SOURCE: Blackmer, Corinne E. “Lesbian Modernism in the Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.” In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer, pp. 78-93. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Blackmer analyzes the lesbian-themed short stories of Woolf and Gertrude Stein to gain insight into their “distinctive approaches to creating lesbian modernist literature.”

To the extent that lesbians have been associated with the obscure, the neglected, and the marginal, there is something quintessentially “lesbian” about bringing the shorter fictions of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein into critical focus. Although her accomplishment in this genre equals that of her contemporary James Joyce, Woolf has not been highly appreciated for her short stories. The standard format for a critical study of Woolf remains, as Avrom Fleishman notes, “a series of chapters on the nine longer fictions, one after another” (“Forms...