Maggie Humm – Snapshots

This book principally coheres around a sense of women’s writing as inseparable from its cultural production. The multi-faceted essays here reveal how feminist criticism changed in one academic’s career from 1986 from the publication of her stellar work, Feminist Criticism. Snapshots discusses theories including ‘the anxiety of influence’, écriture feminine, postmodernism, life-writing all informed by a belief that subjectivity and creativity are integral to non-fiction writing. At the centre of these discussions is the work of Virginia Woolf, whose reputation and scholarly status are unique. The book maps Humm's writing on feminism, visual culture and twentieth-century women’s writing across forty transformative years of criticism.Readers and scholars will benefit from the book’s historical and theoretical range, as well as its autobiographical fragments. It demonstrates how feminists try always to be critically innovative, and the ways in which Maggie Humm's work has opened up new avenues into twentieth-century women’s writing, film and feminist criticism.

Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor whose work on Woolf includes Feminism and Film; Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema; Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts and The Bloomsbury Photographs. Her novel Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from To the Lighthouse, telling her life outside Woolf’s novel, and Lily solves the mystery of Mrs Ramsay’s sudden death. Among other prizes, the novel won ‘Women’s Fiction’ International Impact Awards. Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin, about the artist Gwen John’s affair with Rodin, was a finalist in the American Writing Awards and won the Bookfest Awards for Women’s Historical Fiction.