Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Reading History / Resisting History 2. Greece, Gender, and The Golden Bough 3. History, Ritual, and Gender in Naomi Mitchison's Greece 4. Mana and Narrative in Mary Butts's Greece 5. Cressida's Complexity: Laura Riding Unwrites the White Goddess 6. Masquing the Phallus: Genital Ambiguity in Mary Renault's Historical Novels 7. History as Palimpsest: Gender and Narrative in Bryher's Gate to the Sea 8. Ancient Rome, Gender, and British Imperialism 9. Hostage to History: Naomi Mitchison and Rome 10. When Mana Meets Woman: Mary Butts's Cleopatra 11. Phyllis Bentley: Historical Fiction as Equivocation 12. Bryher the Graeco-Phoenician and Rome 13. "I am his fulfilment": Claiming the Paternal Inheritance Works Cited Index

About the Author

Ruth Hoberman is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. She is the author of Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography 1918-1939, and coauthor of McGraw-Hill Guide to World Literature.

Reviews

"Relying on the notion of a transferential relation of historical narratives borrowed from Dominic LaCapra, among others, the author demonstrates how these writers repeat and subvert the historical narratives in order to make a place for themselves in their culture, their society, and in relation to the male gender. The study makes a reader able to understand what modern women writers found as the appeal-and indeed, the function for self-construction-of historical fiction. Not only does this book open up the work of six relatively underappreciated and very interesting novelists, but it explores how their work both reflects, and uses, the fascination with things Roman and Greek at the turn of the twentieth century. " - Susan Squier, Brill Professor of English and Women's Studies, Pennsylvania State University