The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson

This chapter argues that earlier assessments of Mary Hutchinson’s writing have tended to conflate her status as a feminine arbiter of taste with her work, seeing the two as similarly irrational and slight. Such assessments have contributed to the pervasive assumption that Hutchinson is not a writer of substance and they have been instrumental in facilitating her obscurity and associating her work with a conservative concept of femininity. Instead, this chapter situates Hutchinson’s writing in relation to the Bloomsbury group’s interest in art and argues that her complex articulation of early twentieth-century femininity in Fugitive Pieces (1927) has been unjustly trivialized because of its association with the realm of fashion. Drawing from extensive archival research, this chapter shows how Hutchinson repeatedly puts femininity and modernity into conversation as she interrogates what it would mean if feminine phenomena were given a central place in our cultural analysis of modernity.