"Books Continue Each Other": A Room of One's Own in Barbara Pym's Jane and Prudence

Abstract:In Jane and Prudence, Pym not only presents female characters possessing stores of poetry in their minds but also takes up issues vital to the time, such as the conditions necessary for women to write, changing gender roles, and tenaciously held narrow expectations for women—subjects under scrutiny in A Room of One's Own. Recognizing the dynamic between these texts, I heed Erica Delsandro's call to understand "modernist women writers [as] nodes in the network of modernism, conduits and creators" (6, original emphasis). In looking to A Room of One's Own as a conduit for her own writing, Pym reaffirmed Woolf's findings and also afforded fresh insights into women's lives and literature.