Making Her Time (and Time Again): Feminist Phenomenology and Form in Recent British and Irish Fiction Written by Women

This article reads Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to Be Both alongside Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016) and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017). Using Lauren Berlant’s conception of neoliberal “crisis subjectivity” and Sara Ahmed’s vision of feminist wonderment as an antidote to the neoliberal “promise of happiness,” it argues that each novel considers what might be salvaged and what might grow from situations in which young women become attuned to their mutual incarceration in neoliberal time’s double bind. It contends that the forced improvisation and feminist reorientation undertaken by the protagonists can be analyzed through the lens of temporality. Finally, it contemplates how the disciplinary-specific modes through which the novels’ protagonists consider temporality might be connected to the specific literary projects of their authors.