Course Description:
The course aims to survey the British novel since, and in the wake of, Virginia Woolf – paying specific heed to meaningful engagements with her example or interesting resistances, repressions, or downright avoidals. The focus is limited to novels written by British* women (avoiding commonwealth and colonial/postcolonial writers merely for reasons of economy [*although as usual British incorrectly includes Irish]). Without committing to any particular feminist or theoretical approach (we will survey several), I want us to read the novels, with a background sense of twentieth-century British cultural history, to see how different, talented writers respond to the formal and thematic challenges offered by Woolf, whom I see as a sort of hinge between the great nineteenth-century novelistic tradition and a very changed literary and political world of the twentieth. Major issues include tradition, women’s writing, Modernism and form, sexuality, gender, and subversion.
There is quite a bit of reading: we will spend two weeks per novel and read several different critical and theoretical approaches regarding each writer.
Requirements, besides reading and class participation, will include a presentation and a long final research paper. Students are encouraged to draw the “alternates” into the discussion in their presentations or papers, as well as to explore other works by the main writers, many of who (have) had long and fruitful careers.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938)
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (1954)
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Christine Brooke-Rose, Between (1968)
Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979)
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)
Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2014)


Alternates:
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (1945)
Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings (1958)
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962)
Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden (1967)
Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (1984)
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit (1985)
A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005)
Anne Enright, The Gathering (2007)