Placing modernism: The fictional ecologies of Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby, and Elizabeth Bowen

Modernism is a highly contested term with an ever-widening definition. Using ecocriticism, the study of connections to place, to read modernist texts makes it possible to canonically reposition writers who might otherwise not fit any of the diverse meanings. Ecocriticism's general critical goal of bringing landscape into play with figure was, for many British writers of the time, including Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby, and Elizabeth Bowen, also part of the writer's fictional endeavor. Ecocritical approaches to modernist literature can illuminate one way that writers were searching for meaning: through the creation of fictional ecologies in which deep and abiding associations with physical places provided some answer to the question of how to survive the modern condition.; For Woolf, Holtby, and Bowen, the essential connection to place is woven into their fiction alongside more well-recognized themes. In Virginia Woolf's novels To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Between the Acts, the author's abiding interest in the female artist provides her with a central figure around which attachments to place and the recognition of them revolve. In Winifred Holtby's Yorkshire novels, the need to abandon traditional, gendered ways of relating to physical places and the natural world is examined. In Anderby Wold, The Crowded Street, Land of Green Ginger, and South Riding, Holtby explores fading agricultural and country-house societies and the suffocating restrictions on how women should interact with place. Elizabeth Bowen illustrates the need for relationships with place as a means to escape the isolation and dislocation she views as far too common in modern society. In her novels The Last September, The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day, and in her nonfiction prose works, she sees connection to locality as inherent to human character, necessary if full self-development is to be achieved. Each of these themes is decidedly modernist and one which other critics have demonstrated as characteristic of the writer in question; by weaving the concept of relationship to place into such established themes, the importance of humanity's necessary connection to the physical landscape emerges as an integral part of the modernist enterprise for these writers.