British Women's Comic Fiction, 1890-1990: Not Drowning, but Laughing

This work focuses upon women who have not merely produced comic texts, but used their comedies to examine laughter itself as a problematic issue. Whether to embrace laughter wholeheartedly, whether to do so in a cautious and limited manner, or whether to forswear it entirely - women's opinions and, indeed, feminists' opinions have seldom been in accord on one answer. For women writers of the 20th century, a century of activism, laughter has been something to be weighed carefully in terms of its ethical, political and pragmatic relationship to feminist values, as well as its ability or inability to help women survive. Rather than offering an exhaustive survey of all comic fiction produced by women over the 20th century, the book examines a few texts in depth, especially those that have been excluded from the usual canon. It argues for the importance of reading little-known, lost or undervalued books by women, and for seeing these so-called "minor" texts as shedding light on major questions, including how female writers have found ways to reshape genres traditionally reserved for or defined by men. Among the figures discussed are late-Victorian feminists and their modern British successors, ranging from Dame Rebecca West to Anita Brookner and Bombay-born lesbian fantasist, Suniti Namjoshi.