Between the 1870s and the 1930s in England an unprecedented number of women writers entered the public sphere as essayists. Whereas George Eliot established the Victorian ‘woman of letters’ as a commanding presence, a generation later the New Woman arose as a complex figure shaping ‘The Woman Question’ for twentieth-century writers like Virginia Woolf. This period between the Victorian and modernist eras saw an increase in women’s political writing on suffrage and the anti-war movement. Yet, the literary place of women’s protest writing in this period remains opaque. Focusing on Woolf’s experiments with a hybrid ‘novel-essay’ in The Years and Three Guineas alongside Vernon Lee’s political essays as precursors, this chapter argues that the modern literary essay developed in tandem with the protest essay. This approach allows for a consideration of the political stakes and achievements of hybrid experiments with the essay that revealed the inseparability of politics and aesthetics.

Before his commission to illustrate Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Fritz Eichenberg (1901–90) had neither read the novel nor been to Britain. To illustrate it from New York and in the middle of World War II, he imaginatively occupied Jane’s lucid gaze. Brontë’s first-person account seems so profoundly personal that many Victorian readers thought that, as its subtitle “An Autobiography” suggested, it must be a memoir. Woolf said that to write down one’s impressions of the novel year after year would be tantamount to recording the story of one’s life. The same could be said of illustrating it. Eichenberg had fled Berlin for New York with his Jewish family in 1933, motivated by fear of retribution for his anti-Hitler cartoons. As he immersed himself in visualizing Jane’s voice, and shaping his figures, background, and compositions around her perspective, he overlaid his experience of flight, emigration, and movement onto Jane’s. His gouging, roughly hewn engravings are a self-portrait, narrativized not by his life events but by Jane’s. His Jane Eyre is also telling of a culture of collection and ownership; the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed his edition to subscribers.

This chapter examines Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–1938), and selections of non-fiction writing by Virginia Woolf published between 1919 and 1925. It argues that the fluid psychology we traditionally associate with twentieth-century experiments in literary form begins with the impact of nineteenth-century climate science on realist fiction. The atmospheric modes of female consciousness and ethereal embodiment that women’s presumed sensitivity to climate engenders in novels like Jane Eyre and Bleak House thus give rise to later, feminist engagements with female authorship such as Richardson’s and Woolf’s. Taking May Sinclair’s pioneering use of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe Pilgrimage in 1918 as a pivot point, the chapter connects Richardson’s acknowledged debt to Villette with the climatic underpinnings that inform Woolf’s responses to both of these novels as well as her famous definition of modern fiction as ‘an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.