Women by the Waterfront

Women by the Waterfront examines the role of the beach in modernist texts written by and about women. Combining original studies of nature writing with a queer perspective on the works of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Stevie Smith and others, this book does not only open fresh pathways in the fields of modernist studies and human geography, it also reveals that beaches are a productive space in women’s experimental literature. A close investigation of cultural artefacts including novels, short stories, story fragments, diary entries, paintings and poems shows that the beach serves as a ‘room of their own’: a flexible, in-between space which women use to challenge, suspend and transgress the limitations of a binary gender order.