Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings such as Robert Hitchens's The Garden of Allah, the esteemed middlebrow novels of May Sinclair or H. G. Wells, or now-canonized works such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, women's boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist, and climax. In this book, Allison Pease explains how the changing meaning of boredom reshapes our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, feminism's struggle to define women as individuals, and male modernists' preoccupation with...

To the Lighthouse is one of the most important of Virginia Woolf's modernist achievements. Written by leading international scholars of Woolf and modernism, this companion to To the Lighthouse will be of interest to students and scholars alike. Individual chapters explore the biographical and textual genesis of the novel; its narrative perspectives and use of form; its thematic and formal attention to time and space; and its representations of feminism and gender as well as generational change, race, and class. Complete with a chapter on the novel's critical history, a chronology, and a guide...