Francesca Wade
Fight to Write
Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World
By Lyndall Gordon
Virago 338pp £28
In Three Guineas, her pacifist tract written as the Second World War loomed, Virginia Woolf called on women to form a Society of Outsiders. No longer, she urged, should ‘the daughters of educated men’ simply ‘bolster up the system’ by remaining passive in the face of masculine militarism; now was the time for women to equip themselves with education, to learn to think for themselves, and to shape a society in which their concerns were reflected. The acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon’s latest book conjures up a transhistorical Society of Outsiders, juxtaposing ‘five extraordinary outsider voices rising in the course of the nineteenth century: a prodigy, a visionary, an outlaw, an orator and an explorer’. Her five subjects – respectively Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf – form a chain of influential women writers who ‘could use their apartness to see the world afresh … tell us not who we are, but who we might be’.
What might an ‘outsider’ be? In A Room of One’s Own, writing about the lack of a historical tradition of women writers, Woolf imagines a talented sister of Shakespeare called Judith who died destined to be forgotten, her desire to write thwarted by social expectations. Judith Shakespeare finds
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is this year's winner of the @BGPrize.
In her review from our June issue, @rosalyster delves into Tasmania, nuclear physics, romance and Chekhov.
Rosa Lyster - Kiss of Death
Rosa Lyster: Kiss of Death - Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
literaryreview.co.uk
‘At times, Orbital feels almost like a long poem.’
@sam3reynolds on Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the winner of this year’s @TheBookerPrizes
Sam Reynolds - Islands in the Sky
Sam Reynolds: Islands in the Sky - Orbital by Samantha Harvey
literaryreview.co.uk
Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's anti-hero, George Smiley.
But is this the missing link in le Carré’s oeuvre, asks @ddguttenplan, or is there something awry?
D D Guttenplan - Smiley Redux
D D Guttenplan: Smiley Redux - Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway
literaryreview.co.uk