Portraying history and heroism in Rebecca West's the Sentinel

Women's History Review

Volumn 14, Issue 3-4, 2005, Pages 507-526

  Laing, Kathryn ^a  

^a NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND   (Ireland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347294411     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020500200436     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Kathryn Laing (Ed.) (2002) The Sentinel an incomplete early novel by Rebecca West, p. 166 (Oxford: Legenda).
2. This incomplete novel, edited and introduced by Kathryn Laing and published in 2002 for the first time, was discovered in the West Archive at the University of Tulsa in 1996. For further details about its discovery, dating and identification see the introduction pp. liv-lvii and Laing's article (2000) The Sentinel: Rebecca West's buried novel, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 19(1), pp. 9-26.
3. West, The Sentinel, p. 38.
4. Jane Marcus (Ed.) (1982) The Young Rebecca: writings of Rebecca West 1911-1917, pp. 93-94 (London: Macmillan). For more on the suffrage movement and prison reform,
5. see June Purvis (1995) The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain, Women's History Review, 4(1), pp. 103-133.
6. Shirley Peterson (1993) The Politics of a Moral Crusade: Gertrude Colmore's Suffragette Sally, in Angela Ingram & Daphne Patel (Eds) Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British women writers 1889-1939, pp. 101-117, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
7. See Ann Norton (2000) Paradoxical Feminism: the novels of Rebecca West, p. Ill (Lanham: International Scholars Publications).
8. For more biographical details, see Victoria Glendinning (1987) Rebecca West (London: Papermac);
9. Carl Rollyson (1995) Rebecca West: a saga of the century (London: Hodder & Stoughton) and the introduction to The Sentinel.
10. Dora Marsden's part in the 'making of modernism' has been considered by a number of critics. See, for example, Bruce Clarke (1996) Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: gender, individualism, science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press);
11. Andrew Thacker (1993) Dora Marsden and The Egoist: 'Our War With Words', English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920, pp. 179-196. More recently, attention has been paid to Marsden's Freewoman magazine in relation to militant suffragism.
12. See Maroula Joannou (2002) The Angel of Freedom: Dora Marsden and the transformation of The Freewoman into The Egoist, Women's History Review, 11(4), pp. 595-611
13. and Cary Franklin (2002) Marketing Edwardian Feminism: Dora Marsden, Votes for Women and the Freewoman, Women's History Review, 11(4), pp. 631-642.
14. Lyn Pykett (2000) The Making of a Modern Woman Writer: Rebecca West's journalism, 1911-1930, in Kate Campbell (Ed.) Journalism, Literature and Modernity: from Hazlitt to Modernism, p. 75 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
15. See Marcus, The Young Rebecca.
16. According to Kabi Hartman, 'In the hands of the suffragettes the conversion narrative. became a literature of political struggle in which suffragettes, portrayed as unambiguous forces of righteousness and justice, crusaded against a sinful, unjust government'. Kabi Hartman (2003) 'What Made Me a Suffragette': the New Woman and the new(?) conversion narrative, Women's History Review, 12(1), p. 45.
17. See, for example, Glenda Norquay (1995) Voices and Votes: a literary anthology of the women's suffrage campaign (Manchester: Manchester University Press);
18. Jane Eldridge Miller (1994) Rebel Women: feminism, modernism and the Edwardian novel, ch. 4 (London: Virago);
19. Jane Marcus's introduction, The Divine Rage to Be Didactic (1980)
20. to a reprint of Elizabeth Robins (1907) The Convert (New York: Feminist Press)
21. and Peterson, 'The Politics of a Moral Crusade', pp. 101-117.
22. See also, for example, Martha Vicinus on the ways in which the WSPU linked spirituality with militant action (1985) Independent Women: work and community for single women 1850-1920, p. 254 (London: Virago)
23. and Gilbert & Gubar's discussion of the links between self-sacrifice, feminism and the woman's movement as a religious development. Susan Gilbert & Sandra Gubar (1989) Home Rule: the colonies of the new woman, in No Man's Land: the place of the woman writer in the twentieth century. Vol. 2, Sex Changes, pp. 68-69 (New Haven: Yale University Press).
24. Martha Vicinus (1985) Independent Women: work and community for single women 1850-1920, p. 254 (London: Virago).
25. Hartman, '"What Made Me a Suffragette"', p. 36.
26. The Bible: Authorized King James Version (1997) Joshua 6 v. 27, p. 269 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
27. For further useful insights into the idea of a female Christ and crucifixion imagery, see Gilbert & Gubar, No Man's Land, pp. 68-69;
28. and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (2000) Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom? the Public and Private Prisons of Constance Lytton, in June Purvis & Sandra Stanley Holton (Eds) Votes for Women, pp. 159-180 (London and New York: Routledge). Significantly too, West draws an analogy between crucifixion and childbirth in this novel. Adela, in prison, 'envied all mothers, even for the very crucifixion which was the gate to the new life of motherhood' (p. 234). Motherhood also features prominently in feminist discourse during this period and here West connects it with the heroic narrative she develops through the novel.
29. Mulvey-Roberts, 'Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom?' p. 171.
30. Sandra Stanley Holton (1990) In Sorrowful Wrath: suffrage militancy and the romantic feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst, in Harold L. Smith (Ed.) British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, p. 22 (Aldershot: Edward Elgar).
31. Sandra Stanley Holton (2000) The Making of Suffrage History, in June Purvis & Sandra Stanley Holton (Eds) Votes for Women, p. 21 (London: Routledge.)
32. June Purvis (2002) Emmeline Pankhurst: a biography, p. 127 (London: Routledge).
33. See also Lisa Tickner's discussion of the iconography of Joan of Arc in Lisa Tickner (1987) The Spectacle of Women: imagery of the suffrage campaign 1907-1914, (London: Chatto & Windus).
34. Jane Marcus (1988) The Asylums of Antaeus Women, War and Madness: is there a feminist fetishism? in Elizabeth Meese & Alice Parker (Eds) The Difference Within: feminism and critical theory, p. 73 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
35. see the introduction to The Sentinel, pp. xxv-xxviii.
36. cited in Barbara Green (1997) Spectacular Confessions, p. 57 (London: Macmillan).
37. Rebecca West (1912) Feminism, Daily Herald, 5 September, in Jane Marcus, The Young Rebecca, p. 368.
38. Pykett, The Making of a Modern Woman Writer, p. 176.
39. Pykett, The Making of A Modern Woman Writer, p. 172.
40. Rebecca West (1922) The Judge, p. 52 (London: Virago).
41. Rebecca West, 'A Reed of Steel', in Marcus, The Young Rebecca, p. 243.
42. West, 'The Life of Emily Davison', p. 179.
43. Amy Knight (1979) Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, Russian Review, 38, pp. 150-151.
44. There are a variety of versions of Maria Spiridonova's story, some, like Margaret Maxwell (1999) Narodiniki Women: Russian women who sacrificed themselves for the dream of freedom (Oxford: Pergamon Press), that reinforce the early heroic cult of Russian female terrorists and others that offer a more critical revisionist reading of her role as a revolutionary.
45. See Amy Knight and also Anna Geifman (1993) Thou Shalt Kill: revolutionary terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
46. The New Age: an independent socialist review of politics, literature, and art (1908) 30 May, pp. 94-95. Available at: www.modjourn.brown.edu/
47. Jaakoff Prelooker (1908) Heroes and Heroines of Russia: true and thrilling revolution stories, pp. 292-303 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co.)
48. John Slatter (1984) Jaakoff Prelooker and The Anglo-Russian, in John Slatter (Ed.) From the Other Shore: Russian political emigrants in Britain, 1880-1917, p. 5 (London: Frank Cass).
49. Katherine Roberts (1994, first published 1910) Pages from the Diary of a Militant Suffragette, reprinted in Marie Mulvey Roberts & Tamue Mizuta (Eds) The Militants: suffragette activism, p. 136 (London: Routlege).
50. E.S. Pankhurst (1969 reprint edition) Life ofEmmeline Pankhurst, p. 160 (New York: Kraus). Emmeline Pankhurst's association with Russian revolutionaries and exiles is recorded in her biography: the many visitors to her Russell Square house in 1888 included 'the Russian refugees Kropotkin, Stepniak and Chaykovsky'.
51. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, p. 28.
52. A.R. Orage (Ed.) The New Age, 26 January 1911, p. 293.
53. Quoted in Slatter, 'Jaakoff Prelooker and The Anglo-Russian', p. 57.
54. Rebecca West (1982 reprint edition) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p. 54 (Harmondsworth: Penguin; first published in two volumes 1941, United States of America: The Viking Press).