Gendered Experiments: Beyond the Realist/Experimental Divide

Carole Sweeney’s Vagabond Fictions; Gender and Experiment in British Women’s Writing, 1945–1970 is a highly engaging and convincing work of feminist critical recovery. Her focus is five of the most interesting mid-century female ‘British’ experimental writers: Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes and Ann Quin. Sweeney shows how the work of these writers is experimental in both content and form, and in this, how ‘Gender and Experiment’ are inextricably bound up. Sweeney brilliantly and wittily articulates this in terms of ‘aesthetic and thematic vagabondage’ (6), the latter of which ‘exhibits a movement away from domestic space, or shows it to be creatively and intellectually limiting for women, and into states of transit, transformation and displacement’ (2). At the same time, Sweeney is careful to avoid connecting femininity and experimentation in a way that ends up essentialising both. In this, Vagabond Fictions deliberately diverges from the argument made in Friedman and Fuch’s Breaking the Sequence, which equates realism with patriarchal structures and pits female writers’ experimentation against this. While Sweeney finds the concept of the ‘alternative fictional space’ (22) of women’s experimental writing useful, she rejects the earlier book’s realism/experimentalism and patriarchal/feminist oppositions. She reconsiders and rejects the so-called return to realism in writing post world war two; instead, Sweeney argues—and here her work contributes to the much needed deconstruction of the realist/experimental divide— the era is characterised by malleable and blurred boundaries between realist and experimental writing. Carole Sweeney, Vagabond Fictions: Gender and Experiment in British Women’s Writing, 19451970, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 304 pp., HB 9781474426176