Strange Intimacies - Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys

by Eret Talviste

Overview

This book explores how the novels by Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys – To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), Between the Acts (1941), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) – maintain an attachment to and love for life amid disenchanting times of war and social change. Drawing from Woolf’s and Rhys’s personal writings and fictions, Talviste demonstrates that Woolf and Rhys locate this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective and oddly intimate moments that function as cracks in the dominant patriarchal and imperial ideologies of Woolf’s and Rhys’s times. To theorise strange intimacy, this monograph rethinks the feminist works of Hélène Cixous, especially her attention to materiality, affect and embodiment, in the light of contemporary affect studies and new materialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399502375
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	10/31/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Eret Talviste is a post-doctoral researcher in English Literature at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Following a PhD scholarship in modernist intimacies at Northumbria Universityin Newcastle, she joined Tartu in 2021 as a part-time researcher. In 2022 she won the Estonian Research Council’s funding for a comparative project 'Women, Nations, and Affect: The Importance of Leida Kibuvits’s Writing in the Context of Transnational Modernisms'. She has published various book reviews, essays, and academic papers in both Estonian and English. This is her first monograph.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Strange Intimacies of Virginia Woolf’s and Jean Rhys’s Modernism
1. Wonder(ing) in To the Lighthouse
2. Yearning in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
3. Non-Familial, Horizontal Threads of Friendship in The Waves
4. Viscerality of Haunting: The Missing People in Voyage in the Dark
5. A ‘tingling, tangling, vibrating’ Englishness in Between the Acts
6. The Embodied Sense of Belonging to a Place in Wide Sargasso Sea

Bibliography
Index