A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf. (Book reviews: next stop: modernism).~(book review)

Publication: English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Publication Date: 01-JAN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 ELT Press

Rosemary Sumner. A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. xiv + 208 pp, $59.95.

A ROUTE to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner's study of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, draws its title from a metaphor in a letter Virginia Woolfwrote to Ethel Smythe in 1931. In this letter Woolf remarked on the fact that her "contemporaries" were "doing the same thing on another railway line," "distracting" her by "flashing past the wrong way." Woolf's description of literary modernism(s), both provocative and characteristically demanding, challenges us to puzzle out how her contemporaries were doing the "same thing" as she while going "the wrong way." However, this is not the task of Sumner's book, which focuses on one "railway line" or "route to modernism": the Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf route. Her analysis of the writings of these three authors "show[s] that there is a route to modernism," the origins of which are found in Hardy and fulfilled in Lawrence and Woolf.

The introduction expounds the distinguishing features of the specific strain of modernism Sumner finds characteristic of these three writers. Following are five chapters on Hardy's writings, some of which provide close readings of lesser-known works like Two on a Tower and The Well-Beloved. The remaining half of Sumner's study...

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