A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew & Anna Wickham (Studies in Major Literary Authors)

Many studies of poetic modernism focus on the avatars of High Modernism, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, who created a critical coterie based on culture and class. A New Matrix for Modernism introduces a matrilineage for modernism that traces a distinct women's poetic voice from the Bronte sisters through Alice Meynell to modernists Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham who combine feminist content with an innovative exploration of formalist prosody. Placing Mew and Wickham in a cultural context, A New Matrix recovers Coventry Patmore's 'angel in the house' metaphor. Distorted by Virginia Woolf, who misread the angel as woman, this metaphor receives an accurate resonance from Walter Pater's 'The Child in the House'. Shifting emphasis from woman to child, mother to daughter and urbs to suburb, relocating modernism's matrilingua to the boundaries of London society and culture, A New Matrix ranges widely among architecture, mental illness, Fabianism, Positivism, Theosophy, women's suffrage and education to a new 'house' for modernism - a woman's place of secret joys and sorrows. Well researched yet passionate, this book will appeal to both the scholar and the generalist interested in modernism, poetry, feminism, culture and British literary history.