Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties

by Gay Wachman

Gay Wachman provides a critical new reading of sexually radical fiction by British women in the years during and after the First World War. She contrasts works by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, Rose Allatini, and Evadne Price with more politically and narratively conservative novels by Radclyffe Hall and Clemence Dane. These writers, she states, formed part of an alternative modernist tradition that functioned both within and against the repressive ideology of the British Empire, using fantasy as a means of reshaping and critiquing a world fragmented by war. Wachman places at the center of this tradition Sylvia Townsend Warner's achievement in undermining the inhibitions that faced women writing about forbidden love. She discusses Warner's use of crosswriting to transpose the otherwise unrepresentable lives of invisible lesbians into narratives about gay men, destabilizing the borders of race, class, and gender and challenging the codes of expression on which imperialist patriarchy and capitalism depended.

236 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointment. The idea of "crosswriting" seemed fascinating, particularly when utilized in a radical queer context, but it was never developed into fully fleshed out concept (at least in the sections I read, which included the introduction). To be fair Wachman's emphasis on imperialism and capitalism are not interests I share, but I found her unfortunately able to utilize the most interesting of novels (including Mrs. Dalloway and The Well of Loneliness) to churn out some notably dull analysis.

But the word "crosswriting" remains an evocative one, and I might co-opt it for my own academic purposes yet.