Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf(Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)

About the Book

Examines the Reading Room of the British Museum using documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources
Roomscape explores a specific site-the Reading Room of the British Museum-as a space of imaginative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London. Drawing on archival materials, Roomscape is the first study to integrate documentary, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this space and its resources for women who wrote translations, poetry, and fiction. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image established by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Roomscape also questions the value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, Roomscape investigates the public, social, and spatial dimensions of literary production. The implications of this study reach into the current digital era and its transformations of practices of reading, writing, and archiving. Along with an appendix of notable readers at the British Museum from the last two centuries, the book contributes to scholarship on George Eliot, Amy Levy, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Virginia Woolf.

Key Features

Appendix of Notable Readers at the British Museum from 1857-1930 (15 pp) as important resource for museum and library studies.Fresh material about translation work at the British Museum by Eleanor Marx (on Flaubert and Ibsen) and Constance Black Garnett (on Russian authors).Demonstrates the importance of library research for poets including Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Amy Levy.Examines George Eliot's research at the British Museum for her historical novel Romola in relation to how this novel depicts reading, library collection, and gendered scholarship.Offers a new reading of Virginia Woolf's researching in and writing about the British Museum and the London Library through her diaries, letters, and creative work.Includes a Coda that brings forward the story of the Round Reading Room from the mid-twentieth century, when A. S. Byatt, Isobel Armstrong, and Gillian Beer relied on this space in the early years of their careers, to the aftermath since the official closing in 1997 when the British Library moved to Euston Road. The fate of the Round Reading Room still hangs in the balance.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; List of Figures; Abbreviations; Chapter One: Exteriority: Women Readers at the British Museum; Chapter Two: Translation Work and Women’s Labour from the British Museum; Chapter Three: Poetry in the Round: Mutual Mentorships; Chapter Four: Researching Romola: George Eliot and Dome Consciousness; Chapter Five: Reading Woolf’s Roomscapes; Coda: Closing Years and Afterlives; Notes; Bibliography; Appendix; Index.

About the Author :
Susan David Bernstein is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Review :
...the sheer force of material reality described and analyzed by this astute, generous writer makes for rich, provocative reading. Roomscape [demonstrates] the continuing relevance, across time and space, of keeping our ears and eyes trained on the past in the interest of shaping our collective future as feminist scholars. Roomscape [demonstrates] the continuing relevance, across time and space, of keeping our ears and eyes trained on the past in the interest of shaping our collective future as feminist scholars. In a work of pioneering archival recovery and dazzling theoretical innovation, Susan 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 ground-breaking 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. By drawing women back towards the foci of 19th-century intellectual life, Bernstein has done library history a great service. Roomscape deserves to find a readership, for its original pursuit of a rich topic and the possibilities it suggests for further study. Roomscape deserves to find a readership, for its original pursuit of a rich topic and the possibilities it suggests for further study. In a work of pioneering archival recovery and dazzling theoretical innovation, Susan 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 ground-breaking 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.