While modernist fictions such as A Passage to India presented estranging accounts of Empire, other novels of the era defamiliarized the domestic realm as well. In truth, modernism treated these domains as more tightly intertwined than ever before. The close connection between colony and home was apparent in two familiar modernist narratives about how everyday existence in the twentieth century differed from that of the nineteenth century. One of those two stories is the oft-repeated supposition that the turn of the century saw the reversal of colonization. Such speculation appeared in coterie and popular fictions alike, and it characteristically involved the intrusion of matter from the far-flung colonies into the private recesses of the household. The other narrative appeared in an equally broad range of media and concerned the displacement of feminine sentimentality by female sexuality. Novels, psychological tracts, and economic essays described the undoing of heroines by new, unconscious, and largely misunderstood desires that could not help but embarrass and unsettle, even when animating and inspiring, the most composed of middle-class women.

Given that modernist fiction linked these stories of nation and self analogically, it makes sense to read each in terms of the other. Indeed, I argue, they ought to be understood in that dependent relationship.