Single Women, Space, and Narrative in Interwar Fiction by Women

In this thesis I examine single women in the interwar fiction of five women writers. Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Virginia Woolf were all writing during a period of intense speculation about unmarried women and all gave major roles to them in their fiction. During the period following the First World War the single woman was repeatedly dismissed as ‘surplus’ or ‘superfluous’, with the suggestion that there was no place for her in Britain. Anxieties circulated about her financial status, her moral standing, and her sexual and psychological stability. I propose that single women offered distinct textual challenges and revolutionary opportunities to women writers, and I consider the effects of these women on the narratives of writers who chose to offer them a place in their texts.