Questioning sexual modernity: Rebecca West’s sunflower

Abstract

In 1925 Rebecca West began working on a new novel, Sunflower; never completed, it was published posthumously by Virago Press in 1986, with an Afterword by West's official biographer, Victoria Glendinning, in which she reveals the novel to be a roman a clef This confessional mode of reading Sunflower removes its political context and overlooks effects which function in the novel as an implicit commentary on early twentieth-century British sexual modernism. To restore these representations of sexuality in Sunflower, one has to read against the grain of confessional transparency. A critical, contradictory feminism is integral to the generic layers of West's modernist fiction and the intertextualities of her images. These layers and intertextualities disclose West's ambivalence towards, andengagement in literary 'debate' about contemporary sexual modernity during the 1920s. West associates pre-war sexual modernity with a domestication of icons of late nineteenth-century decadence.