Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 by Anna Snaith

Anna Snaith’s Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945, is a timely study that illuminates colonial women writers’ foundational role in literary modernism and the ways in which their representations of London disrupt imperial claims to stability. Through her paradigm of the “voyage in,” with its playful reversal of Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (1915), Snaith focuses on the unprecedented mobility offered by the ship to demonstrate how colonial women writers shaped modernity: “These women were not coming to London solely to experience modernity, they were a constituent part of it” (26). Modernist Voyages is, in short, a story of reversals: a reversal of the traditional route of imperial expansion from London to the colonies, a reversal of London’s assumed influence on colonial literary production, and a reversal of critical conversations and practices. Modernist Voyages participates in the “spatial turn” within...