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Exclusion from male-dominated society fuelled female authors' creativity, says Gail Marshall
Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World
By Lyndall Gordon
Virago, 352pp, £20.00
ISBN 9780349006338
Published 26 October 2017
In the final chapter of her new book, Lyndall Gordon turns to Virginia Woolf's description of the "Society of Outsiders" in
Three Guineas
(1938). With war threatening, Woolf writes to her imagined male interlocutor that "The Society of Outsiders has the same ends as your society - freedom, equality, peace; but...it seeks to achieve them by the means that a different sex, a different tradition, a different education, and the different values which result from those differences have placed within our reach".
Outsiders
explores the impact of those differences in the lives and works of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Woolf, and suggests that the writers' cumulative experience...