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Description
Avenging Muse is the biography of Naomi Royde-Smith, a powerful early twentieth-century British literary editor who discovered and published the first works of such writers as Rupert Brooke, Rose Macaulay, and Graham Greene. Beginning at age 50, she became in her own right a prolific author of more than thirty novels in addition to plays, biographies, and cultural critiques posing as travelogues. She writes about fin de siècle Geneva, about London and working women between the wars, about journalism and theater, about artists and their promoters, about banal culture, about social class in disarray, about a world that lacks spiritual center. Bravely Royde-Smith also writes about the lives of women loving women, men loving men, and tales about ordinary men and women in love-or not. The historical environment surrounding her writing, as well as those about whom she wrote, was morally and legally hostile to exploration of sexualities. Her fictions, witty and empathetic, emerge from her own experiences. Royde-Smith enjoyed her work as a professional muse-literary editor in London of the prestigious Saturday Westminster Gazette and then the Queen; however, she did not enjoy being cast by writers, such as Walter de la Mare and Henry Spiess, as their personal muse. Indeed, in certain of her novels, she retaliated against men who trespass, attacking their self-absorbed use of women in the name of art. Her personal story corresponds with an increasing historical realization of women's rights, a realization that undermines romantic and neoromantic reverence for conventional muses. Her writings anticipate current literary and feminist theories of performative gender.
Publication Date
2015
Keywords
feminist, Naomi Royde-Smith, gender, performative, muse
Disciplines
English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Women's Studies
Recommended Citation
Benton, Jill. Avenging Muse: Naomi Royde-Smith 1875-1965, 2015.
Comments
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.