The family saga in women's writing between the wars

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the family saga in British women’s writing and explores how

women writers between the two World Wars and within the context of modernity

appropriated the genre. At the turn of the twentieth century social changes in British

society led people to a reconsideration of what family and modernity meant. The

re-imagining of family experience thus caused a flourishing of family sagas,

particularly among women writers, and these sagas enjoyed a widespread readership

and sales. Yet, the family saga has attracted little academic interest and criticism, and

it has even been pejoratively labeled as ‘middlebrow’ writing, seen as conservative,

domestic and feminine.

Thanks to the initial male production of the family saga in the early twentieth

century, a conservative tradition of the family saga was established: a family saga was

a lengthy multi-generational family narrative, written in the realist mode, about the

evolution of a family and its family dynamics. However, women writers have made

shifts and appropriations of this literary form so as to make the personal world of the

family political and open the genre to the discussion of a variety of topics. By tracing

the differences in the family sagas written by Rose Macaulay, Vera Brittain and

Virginia Woolf from the conventional family saga, this study argues that in the hands

of women this feminine and middlebrow genre can be used for a serious consideration

of feminism, the institution of the family and questions of history and modernity. I

will also overturn the conventional assumption of the conservativeness of the family

saga by arguing that the genre opens up space for progressive considerations of the

family as well as space for modernist innovation. Thus, Rose Macaulay articulates her

unique idea of the ‘indefinite sameness’ in history to dialogue with modern views of

the past in Told By An Idiot; Vera Brittain expresses her feminism through her ideal of

the ‘companionate marriage’ in Honourable Estate (1936); and Virginia Woolf

captures the changes in British families through her modernist portrait of a modern

family in The Years.