Mothering Modernity

Book excerpt: This study examines the transformative relationship between Victorian mothers and their modern daughters in the works of six early British modernists (E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, D.H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf). The emphasis upon a female hero is a significant and largely unremarked similarity in some of the most significant works of these authors. In these novels, the female hero, in order to attain her full potential as an agent of social and artistic changes, must undergo a maturation process that leads from the father's world of language and public action to a new appreciation of the mother's unrecognized, alternative virtues. Exploring the emergence of the young, modern woman as the hero in the works of these formative authors, Hill traces the gendered development of notions of modernity and the negotiation of new forms of mother-daughter relationship at the birth of modernity and modernist art, providing a more richly nuanced understand of the issue of gender in modernism.