Representative instances: Woolf, Storm Jameson, Lessing, Attia Hosain

While women writers have long been established as contributors to the history of the novel, the sixty-year period covered by this chapter traces developments in experimentation with the novel as a form, and as a vehicle for new and challenging content. Women, now having greater access to education, respond both to the aesthetic debates of the day, and to rapid changes in their cultural, social, and political context. Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, Doris Lessing, and Attia Hosain demonstrate the range of women novelists' achievements over a greater part of the century.

Virginia Woolf develops during the 1920s a major tool of modernist writers pioneered by Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair: the stream of consciousness that reflects the mind's interior monologue. In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf asks whether the novel is as yet “rightly shaped” for the woman writer's use, given that the form has been dominated by male authors. She is in no doubt that the woman writer will soon adapt novelistic form to her own purposes, “providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet.” Accordingly, in The Waves (1931) Woolf develops poetic devices (such as repeated rhythms and phrases, together with image clusters) that explore the minds of six friends growing from childhood into adulthood. Each phase of their lives is interspersed with lyrical descriptions of sea and seasons, mirroring their maturation – and the simultaneous aging of the British Empire.