The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography

Georgia JOHNSTON, The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography. Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 216 p.

ISBN 1-4039-7618-X

SUMMARY

In their literary autobiographies, modernists Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) challenge the scientific figures of the perverse lesbian, particularly those promulgated by Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud.  By multiplying their “I”s, manipulating subject and object divisions, undermining boundaries between writer and audience, and using repetition to code erotic moments, these writers queer the terms of autobiography.  That queering requires understanding autobiography as more institutional than introspective, and the autobiographies themselves question the very theories that determine them:  theories of lesbianism, female development, and memory.

CONTENTS

Queering the Subject of Modernist Lesbian Autobiography 

Wholes in the Dykes: Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud Figuring the Lesbian

Counterfeit Perversions in Vita Sackville-West's Portrait

Virginia Woolf's Subjectivities and (Auto)Biographies 

Hilda Doolittle's Lesbian Visions 

Lesbian Textualities in Stein's Lifting Belly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Georgia Johnston is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Saint Louis University.