Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing: Realism, Feminism, Materialism

Abstract

Emilie Walezak’s recent publication, Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing, is a focussed study of women’s realist fiction in Britain—a study that carefully considers the thorny issue of realism in the contemporary novel. Truth be told, realism is a notoriously slippery term1 and first became an issue with modernist claims to even greater realism in the early twentieth century and, later, with the advent of poststructuralism and its offshoot, postmodernism—both theoretical positions that linked conventional realist representation with conventional world views. Against this perspective, Walezak argues that realism is currently being reinvented. She undertakes an examination of fictional and non-fictional texts by an impressive number of writers, moving deftly between A.S. Byatt, Bernardine Evaristo, Rose Tremain, Pat Barker, Andrea Levy, Sarah Hall, and Zadie Smith, as well as the writing of emerging novelists such as Sarah Moss and Melissa Harrison. For once, those of us who truly value realism and find in it a challenge to the normative can feel that our passion is vindicated rather than utterly naive.