By Susan David Bernstein
Roomscape examines
the Reading Room of the British Museum as a space of imaginative and
historically generative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women
writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London.
Drawing on archival materials around this national library
reading room, Roomscape is the first
study that integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary
sources to examine the significance of this public interior space for women
writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces in literary texts.
This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as
a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image firmly established by
Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own
and the legions of feminist scholarship that upholds this spatial conceit.
Susan David Bernstein argues not only that the British
Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary
traditions, she also questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy
in constructions of female authorship, a principle generated from Woolf's
feminist manifesto. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary,
individual events, Roomscape
considers the meaning of exteriority and the public and social and gendered
dimensions of literary production.
“In a work of pioneering archival recovery and dazzling
theoretical innovation, Susan David Bernstein discovers a space where British
women writers from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf found solace, intimacies, and
communities crucial to their professional identities and intellectual
development. Bernstein’s groundbreaking feminist study produces startling new
discoveries. No one will regard Virginia Woolf the same way. Roomscape is a tour de force of
interdisciplinary cultural history of the highest order.”—Priya Joshi, Temple
University
Purchase from Edinburgh University Press or Columbia University Press.
