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. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:HKU/oai:hub.hku.hk:10722/174541 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Tse, Hoi-lam, Karen., 謝凱琳. |
| Contributors | Gan, WCH |
| Publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) |
| Source Sets | Hong Kong University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PG_Thesis |
| Source | http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B47849836 |
| Rights | The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works., Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License |
| Relation | HKU Theses Online (HKUTO) |
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