Abstract
abstract: Working with the archive of the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (1919–40) at Cambridge University Library, this article reconstructs the intellectual and administrative labor of the prize's all-women committee of literary judges. I study the Femina from several angles: its uneasy status as a middlebrow cultural institution; the committee's position as a group of professional literary women reading other women's writing; and its negotiation of the period's political writing. Considering the role committee work like this played in "making modernism" involves a shift in emphasis from individual moments of creative rapture to the humdrum work of collective reading and consensus building. This article argues that the Femina committee, with its compelling combination of institutional history and women's labor, can "weaken" other "muscular" narratives of modernism.
Published Version
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