Modernist women writers were innovators both in
terms of what and how they wrote. They revised
patriarchal norms of writing by first setting out to
destroy binary oppositions, which, they insisted,
imposed restrictions on women's gender, sex, race,
and creativity. Early proponents of what today we
know as social construction theory, Gertrude Stein,
Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle saw gender not
as an ontological essence but rather as a
construction, produced in acts of social
performance: as costume or garment that might be
donned or stripped, as it pleases the wearer, but
certainly tailored to each individual. This book
takes the reader back to the 1920s by exploring the
experimental fiction of this grand generation. It
examines the narrative strategies and untraditional
literary choices women writers made in order to
create a new fictional space for themselves. For it
is in this separate fictional sphere where they
lived and wrote their experiences as women and
created female subjectivities freed from binary
categories.