In 1940, Virginia Woolf confessed: "I think of all my books as music before I write them." In this work, Emma Sutton compares Woolf's entire novelistic output, as well as several of her essays and short fiction, to music by classical composers, such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, as well as Woolf's own musical friends: Ethel Smyth, Nadia Boulanger, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Bruno Walter. Sutton reads Woolf's attitudes toward nationalism, class, anti-Semitism, and gender through these juxtapositions and contextualizes her engagement with music within the aesthetic experiments of the...

This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf's writing. In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf's novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf's numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf's interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study...

This is the first book-length study of Forster’s posthumously-published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives in literature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Begun in 1913 and revised over almost fifty years, Maurice became a defining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yet the critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ of Forster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aesthetic contexts for this novel.  This collection places Maurice...