Every historical period is definitively designated as such only in retrospect; as a daily experience, a period is a series of ruptures or a gradual transition from one to the next, depending on the perspective. While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a rupture, a revolution, a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past in the wake of the new, differentially, depending on one’s circumstances in early twentieth-century global modernity.¹ This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition from the “traditional” to the “modern,” the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London, in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies that both un-do some imperial trappings as well as re-do prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership or to which they aspire. Writing from her Regent’s Park home in London, the Anglo-Irish Reference BowenBowen records how her surroundings “were repeatedly and heavily blasted by V1s, which shattered not only the inside part of the house but [my] writing routine” (Weight 12).² I would venture to say that the technologies of the Second World War (the V-1 bombs) disrupt not only Bowen’s domestic and writerly life but become one of the factors, along with the other social and political revolutions of the times, that impacts aesthetic form and function. Other technologies, such as the telephone, had already fractured experience and meaning in new ways; Reference Mansfield, Kimber and DavisonMansfield writes on May 21, 1918: “I positively feel, in my hideous modern way, that I can’t get into touch with my mind. I am standing, gasping in one of those disgusting telephone boxes and I can’t ‘get through’” (Diaries 247).

As with the period marked as modernism, so with the figure of the New Woman – she appears in clear and sharp relief, in retrospect, on urban cultural landscapes but is, in the moment of emergence, made mobile across the thresholds between cultural and technological traditions and innovations. To the extent that Bowen, Smith, Livesay, Mansfield, and Rhys are figurations of the New Woman, they are, more accurately, versions of what might be dubbed the New-Woman, where the hyphen conveys their transient as well as transitional status. Generally, “technology” refers to the material infrastructure of modernity that the women authors encountered and adapted; in this essay, it refers more specifically to “tékhnē,” the craft or skill that these writers display in their diaries, which are the closest but also inexact guides to their experiences as authors and women. Furthermore, “technology” derives from “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experience (the traces) of being-in-empire.

As women traveling to and from the perceived “periphery” to the “center” (the “Mother Country”), the authors enter the modern, and by extension, modernism, by adopting and negotiating both “new” and “old” machinic and aesthetic technologies.³ I have selected Bowen, Smith, Livesay, Mansfield, and Rhys for their heritages in British settler-colonial outposts; these geographical peripheries had Dominion status (except for the Caribbean), which meant that White “citizens” benefited from a racialized privilege.⁴ The gendered connotation of the “Mother Country” inflects this privilege for all the women writers and becomes integral to their personae and productions, as is evident across their careers.⁵ These writers, all émigrés-become-residents in British imperial metropoles, perform the paradoxical rhetorics of empire–democracy in texts in which they un-do form, the only aesthetic means to generate meaning and convey its effects, while they also struggle to retain some semblance of belief in the (White) liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the New-Woman. Their techniques retain the vestigial Victorian subject and aesthetics, specifically White, but rarely named as such. The traces of racialized others who are formative in their own settler-colonial histories appear visibly in their early journal, diary, and autobiographical entries, and then gradually vanish from view as they strive to present the authorial self, the (White) modernist woman writer who negotiates “old” and “new.” I argue that the aesthetic modes through which traces of the native and Indigenous dis/appear in their hybrid technologies illuminate the authors’ own understanding of their place as modern, White women writers in imperial metropoles.

The Technology of the Modernist Missive

These authors, positioned as they are in terms of their heritages, places of origin, and education, claim their cultural traditions to be the literary heritages of Western Europe, primarily England and France, and North America, and not the traditions of Aotearoa or Zulu or other Indigenous lineages that each lists in her diaries. Imbibing the history of European and North American literatures, for instance, is itself a technology through which they understand their artistic heritages. Their standards of achievement, of “good” and “bad” writing, derive from this “education,” and inform their own compositions as well as the means to assess/review other publications. These structures of value are inevitably coded in terms of race, nationality, and gender.⁶

In the foreword to Tomato Cain and Other Stories by Nigel Kneale, Reference Bowen and HepburnBowen draws attention to the form and technology of the short story, observing that now there are “genuinely interested” readers “who value craftsmanship and react to originality” (People, 250, emphasis mine).⁷ She comments approvingly that Kneale is “not dependent on regionalism … but … draws strength from it” and that “his work at its best has the flavour, raciness, ‘body’ that one associates with the best of the output from Ireland, Wales, Brittany, and the more remote, untouched and primitive of the States of America” (Reference Bowen and HepburnBowen, People 251, emphasis mine). Reference Bowen and HepburnBowen continues on to mention Maupassant, Kipling, Wells, Saki (H. H. Munro), and Maugham as frames of reference. She adopts the urbane, cosmopolitan, hegemonic gaze in delineating the geographical and artistic standards which establish value; there appears to be a word missing in the phrase “primitive of the States of America,” perhaps “regions,” and the import of the observation is the relationship between “regionalism” and the local or the “primitive.”

Reference Mansfield and ScottMansfield, from a different margin of the British Empire, expresses on December 21, 1908, a strong desire to write

The model presented by English literary heritage (Pater) will frame a picture of Wellington (the local, the regional, the natural); her destination is, naturally, Europe and the anticipation of “dual existence” and disillusionment is prescient, illuminating the relationship between aesthetic technologies and cultural traces that arise for all the modernist authors in their connection to the British Empire. For Rhys, the “dual existence” similarly allows her to claim an intimate knowledge about her “native” regions, like Mansfield, but also becomes the basis to critique the “center.” This current discussion focuses on the authors’ nonfictional work but Rhys’s tour de force, the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, bears mention here. Across a prolonged period (1957 to 1966), Rhys writes to various correspondents, expressing shock and annoyance at Brontë’s depiction of the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre, because it is “only one side – the ‘English side,’” and deferring the question of whether she herself had any “right” to tackle the representation.⁸ Despite this implied doubt about her place and legitimacy, Rhys is “fighting mad to write her story,” that is, the story of “that particular mad Creole [who] … is cold … fire [being] the only warmth she knows in England” (emphasis in original).⁹ However, this “Indigenous” persona is, as clearly indicated, Creole, not Black, Arawak, or Carib.

The diaries of Rhys, Mansfield, Bowen, Livesay, and Smith, as means of expression and confession, are sites of negotiation in which the “traditional” form and structure of descriptive narrative and realist chronicle merge with “new” scattered sketches of moments. In “World’s End and a Beginning,” Reference RhysRhys describes filling three and a half “exercise books” at the age of twenty, taking them with her whenever she moves, but does not make them the foundation of a linear narrative, for she “never looked at them again for seven years” (Smile Please 105). Pauline Smith’s letters are self-conscious contemplations on her literary technique, containing both direct statements on politics in South Africa as well as disjunctures and discontinuities, of the kind that Mansfield experiences about being on the phone. Reference SmithSmith writes to “Sarie” (a correspondent who requests anonymity) on November 17, 1946: “I have never myself been able to learn how to write – I do only what I can – never what I ought by rule or art” (“Letters” 33, emphasis mine) and again to the same addressee on April 18, 1948: “I’m afraid my letter is worse written than ever – …. But I write too much, & too badly” (Reference SmithSmith, “Letters” 48). Here, Smith reveals an awareness of unspoken standards of value (“ought”) and evaluates her writing negatively in implicit comparison to “good writing.”

The Vanishing Indigene

The title of this section is a version of the “Vanishing Indian,” a common myth perpetuated in the US of the gradual disappearance of Native American peoples, and a cruel gloss on the systematic cultural and physical genocide that settler colonials committed. The response from Native peoples in North America is: “We’re still here.” I do not intend to draw a straight line from that reference, which occurred later in US history than the era being discussed here, to these modernist writers. Rather, I draw attention to the fading presence of Indigenous peoples in the authors’ textual praxes.

As depicted in the previous section, the diaries are intentional technologies of remembrance and record, penned by women whose Whiteness, implicitly or explicitly, becomes an indelible marker of their claims to belonging in the imperial metropole’s cultural scene. Flashes of their “native” cultures, strong at first when they are in their homelands, begin to vanish from their chronicles as the authors travel to the “Mother Country” (England, and that Mother is White), which supplants their homelands as the place of their rebirth and homecoming.¹⁰ As the bonds that tie them to their homelands become frayed, and the Indigenous vanishes, seemingly so does the part of them that is connected to those formative influences. In this way, the Indigene vanishes twice – the actual people whom they lived alongside and the elements of their past that they retained prior to their passages to England.

How does the Indigene appear as trace and then vanish without a trace? In Beginnings, Reference LivesayLivesay depicts the Indigenous at Indian Point as “half-naked, tousled … children [scampering] away, like ants scuttling into cracks”; the foreigner (Polish) Anna, their maid, is thought to have joined the “Indians” (51). Thus, native and foreigner are dispensed with in Reference LivesayLivesay’s record of her early life and replaced by Gina, the main character in the only chapter in Journey with My Selves in which the subject is addressed as “you”; this technique gives her individuality and breaks the mold of the memoir to simulate the mode of the letter. The Indigene is resurrected in Gina’s nickname (“Cherokee”) but simultaneously sublimated and disappeared completely in Livesay’s activities with Gina. Together, the young Dorothy and Gina memorize Shakespeare, Marvell, and de la Mare, learn English, French, and Latin, and study Horace, Virgil, Dryden, and, later, H. D., Pound, and Amy Lowell, among others. Reference Mansfield, Kimber and DavisonMansfield, in 1907, describes her passion for a Māori school friend Maata Mahupuku: “I want Maata … as I have had her – terribly. This is unclean I know but true … I feel savagely crude, and almost powerfully enamoured of the child” (Diaries 52). This intimate link to Indigenous identity is portrayed in negative terms, in stark contrast to the romantic and sensual language she uses for her relationships to Edith K. Bendall (Diaries 47) and Arnold Trowell (Diaries 53).

In “Black/White,” Reference RhysRhys describes the “Riot” (directed at a neighboring newspaper editor) as “a strange noise like animals howling” and realizes “it was people” who may kill her but that “strange idea didn’t frighten [her] but excited [her]…” (Smile Please 37). She describes how “a certain wariness did creep in when [she] thought about the black people who surrounded [her]” (Smile Please 38). Writing as late as the 1960s about her childhood in the 1890s–1910s, Reference RhysRhys names Meta, her childhood nurse, the “Black Devil,” and describes her as a malicious woman who scares her by describing how her eyes would drop out of her head because she read so much, “except the little black points,” and would look at her from the page (Smile Please 21). Despite this horrifying image, Rhys writes that she kept reading and lists the canonical English literature that she consumes – Irish fairy stories, The Adventures of Ulysses, the Encyclopedia Britannica, books by Milton, Byron, Cowper, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress (Smile Please 20–1).

Reference RhysRhys records that most of the relationships with peers are also based in racial animosity. However, the shocked distance from the animal and the explicitly hostile, based in racialized superiority, coexists with a mixture of desire and envy. At the convent, where “white girls were very much in the minority,” she is fascinated by a girl who “didn’t look coloured” (Smile Please 39). However, she sees “impersonal, implacable hatred” in the girl’s face, after which she “never tried to be friendly with any of the coloured girls again … [she] was polite and that was all” (Smile Please 39). “We are hated” is her stunning realization. At the same time, she records hearing her mother say that “black babies were prettier than white ones” and wonders whether that was the reason for her own ardent prayers to become Black and the reason she kept running to the mirror “to see if the miracle had happened” (Smile Please 33). She feels envy at Black women’s strength and ability to carry greater weight, their laughter, their drums and dances (of which White people had fewer); the sense that they projected of being “more alive, more a part of the place than we were” makes her envy rise “to a fever pitch at carnival time” (Smile Please 39–41). Envy and sublimated un-belonging mix with a tinge of moral disgust about Black women’s free sexuality and fertility even as she appears to complain about the mores of marriage and virtue that bind her own life.

If Indigenous peoples are not considered other than human (animal-like or devilish), they are depicted as more than human (enigmatic, magical). In “Anna,” the only chapter focusing on the Indigenous in Beginnings, Reference LivesayLivesay describes the eponymous foreigner as entranced with the young man at Indian Point, who is “expressionless … so brown and silent” (47). In Reference Mansfield and ScottMansfield’s Notebooks, a section titled “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht,” contains “A True Tale,” addressed to “my little Saxons” – it describes a captivating island where there are “no white people … but tall, stately, copper coloured men and women”; she tells her readers to “be glad that [they] did not live in the time that Motorua did” (1: 40, 9); Motorua is a made-up “Māori” name. Reference Mansfield, Kimber and DavisonMansfield’s The Urewera Notebook, a diary of her travels (November 23–December 17, 1907) in the area east of the volcanic plateau in the middle of the North Island – considered Māori country – includes the charming Bella, “the very dusk incarnate”; her remark trails off into an incomplete and inarticulate thought: “– The life they lead here” (Diaries 64). It is fittingly fleeting since Reference Mansfield, Kimber and DavisonMansfield is only passing through, not burdened with any responsibility or commitment; she can thus pluck out and freeze lives into fantasized moments suspended from colonial history. In 1916, writing about Nastasya Filippovna, Reference Mansfield and ScottMansfield admires her “almost ‘technical’” knowledge of “how things are in the world … not at all impossible. With such women it appears to be a kind of instinct. Maata was just the same – she simply knew these things from nowhere” (Diaries 183). This Maata is the same person for whom she describes feeling powerful and “savagely crude” feelings.¹¹

Decontextualization is a frequent mode of including Indigenous references: Reference Mansfield and ScottMansfield expresses a longing for the “authentic” English and Māori, not recognizing the hybrid as a product of the colonial history of which she herself is a part. She records meeting Prodgers on her Urewera travels, expressing that “it is splendid to see once again real English people,” and being “so tired & sick of the third rate article … [the mixed race peoples who] wear a great deal of ornament in Umuroa & strange hair fashions” (Notebooks 2: 141). In an earlier diary entry (1903), she describes waking up to the strains of “Swanee River,” listening to it all day and hearing it as a lullaby. The fact that the song is an enslaver’s nostalgia about plantation life is completely elided in her avid consumption of “American” literature. Her diaries of this period record related reading material and music – Heinrich Heine, Poe, Léon Boëllmann, and Bach; she even draws similarities between herself and John Addington Symonds. Later, her reading fully overwhelms the links to the Indigenous – de Maupassant, William Morris, Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Symons – and her writing includes copious notes on Hawthorne, Balzac, Pater, Flaubert, and Stevenson.

If not decontextualized, Indigenous peoples are anonymous and silent and, once again, denigrated. In Bowen’s review of Conrad M. Arensberg’s The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (in The Listener, April 28, 1937), the “countryman” of the Clare coast remains unnamed. Bowen uses the word “primitive” to mean “first” and “untouched,” and romanticizes the traditions of the coastal folk, thus simulating the anthropological gaze of the author that she reviews. In Secret Fire (1913–14), Pauline Reference SmithSmith describes “[c]rowds of coloured people … Jews and Jewesses in their Sabbath clothes,” making sure to note that there was “[n]ot a face [she] knew” (8). Derogatory terms such as kaffir (the Xhosa peoples), Hottentot (the Khoikhoi peoples), and coolie (Indians and Chinese peoples) occur frequently in Smith’s diary entries. Native peoples are not named unless they work in White people’s homes, for example, the “quiet, staid Kaffir [Xhosa] girl, middle-aged, Judith” (Smith 4) who serves tea and cake. George and Phillida, “the Servants” (Reference SmithSmith 101) are given section titles, but only have first names, while the “Malay Wash-Ayahs,” who are also given a short section, remain unnamed, like the anonymous “‘bound girls’” (Reference SmithSmith 196); Smith does not comment on what is essentially conscription or enslavement. Stories about the Indigenous and other peoples are about murder, greed, ignorance, and poverty in contrast with the detailed stories of domesticity, sympathy, and affection about White South Africans who are named and given section titles; “Americans” are not racially marked and thus assumed to be White. Smith’s distance from the observed is like Mansfield’s in The Urewera Notebook and presages the ultimate disappearance of all the figures that crowd both authors’ early narratives.

White Pastoral, White Cosmopolitan

As important as Indigenous peoples in the authors’ self-fashioning-in-process are the settings of their persona, especially as the backdrop to their movements between pastoral peripheries and cultural centers. Both on the page and in life, those passages constitute their “position” as they and others perceived them in their modernist milieux in the British Empire. “Pastoral” either romanticizes the reality of rural residents (often the Indigenous) or renames the rural as a romantic setting for White settlers. The authors’ re-invocations recall the prevailing imperial conceptions of the pastoral, and contest but also perpetuate them: Contest them by refusing the pastoral and cosmopolitan as antitheses, and perpetuate them by parsing the pastoral as White space and the primeval as Indigenous. In their diaries, letters, and essays, the White pastoral is part of civilizational modernity, romanticized as down-to-earth and honest, while the primeval is exotic, lush but “undeveloped,” untamed, and full of mystery and dread.

Livesay’s paternal homestead “Woodlot,” Rhys’s familial home “Geneva,” and Mansfield’s house on Tinakori Road are sites where White pastoral and White cosmopolitan identities intersect; the Indigenous presences remain liminal in the technologies of modernist chronicles that record what is essentially settler history, but in oblique and deflected language. Reference LivesayLivesay’s father, “a young immigrant,” builds Woodlot and his friends are “gentleman farmers in their colonial homestead, Benares” (Journey 179). She has fond memories of her own budding literary career under her mother’s tutelage that extended also to “schoolchildren … from Indian reserves and residential schools” (Journey 20). She extols Canada which, “for the sake of its landscape, for the sake of its youth … is the place to live in” (Journey 104); however, she concludes that England is “great” because it is “small,” unlike Canada which has “too many differences in each province” (Journey 104). Geneva, Reference RhysRhys’s ancestral homestead, two hours by horseback from Roseau, is the lush but declining and overgrown estate of “slave-owner the Lockharts … [who] were never very popular … putting it mildly” (Smile Please 25–6). When she returns many years later, she finds a destroyed place; “there was nothing, nothing. Nothing to look at. Nothing to say” (Smile Please 29). Reference Mansfield and ScottMansfield’s house in Tinakori Road is, she writes in 1915, “a big white painted square house” with a wraparound verandah that jostles with dwellings of “an endless family of halfcastes” and gardens “with empty jam tins and old saucepans and black iron kettles without lids” (“Notebook 45,” Diaries 176–7). The Indian schoolchildren from Canada’s boarding schools, the enslaved in Dominica, and the “halfcastes” on Tinakori Road fade away on the borders of narratives that move between the “old” and “new.”

In their cosmopolitan life in cities such as London and New York, Rhys, Smith, and Livesay explicitly mark yet more others, Jewish and Black strangers and acquaintances, in their habitual manner of delineating similarities but accentuating differences. Reference Rhys, Wyndham and MellyRhys writes to Evelyn Scott on Sunday, February 18, 1934, about being in a Bloomsbury (London) bedsit where the owner is “a huge coloured lady” who is “[v]ery chic … pearl earrings and everything (and I believe a compatriot)” and who comes by to demand rent (Letters 23). The sentence begins with exoticized difference and ends on a speculation about their possible similarity which is relegated to a parenthesis. She makes sure to note the nationality and ethnic identities of the two “German Jewish ladies (born in Wales and very sympathique)” who take over the house after the West Indian woman passes away.

In the same letter, Reference Rhys, Wyndham and MellyRhys writes: “the past exists – side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was – is” (Letters 23). Despite this recognition of the past, the cosmopolitan modernist diarist and letter-writer arrives more fully into their profession by utterly erasing traces of the Indigenous who were so prominent in their early years and turning to invest wholeheartedly in White Englishness, their technology of knowing themselves as literary, political, and cultural commentators. Reference BowenBowen declares that she “can speak, inevitably, chiefly for England” (Collected Impressions 158); in “English and American Writing,” she claims England as “our country” and designates America (the US) as “foreign” (Weight 6); she also uses the word “indigenous,” by which she means (White) “home-grown” and not “Native.” At the same time, an essay such as “Doubtful Subject” offers a commentary on Irish/Gaelic history and culture being neglected or denigrated by English readers (Collected Impressions 173ff.).¹² Reference SmithSmith, in her early records, takes it upon herself to analyze the cosmopolitan scene of the Dutch, the English, and the Jews – in her view, the Dutch have never forgiven the English for emancipating the slaves, and they envy but also imitate Jews who are slim, cunning, and “to be feared and hated … somewhere vaguely between the lowest of poor Christian whites and those coloured races who ought still to be slaves” (Secret Fire 335). She deflects from her observations by drawing attention to the technology of writing stating that “this subject always interests [her], and it is only on paper that [she] can ever straighten out [her] thoughts about it” (Secret Fire 335).

Despite their proprietary tone, the cosmopolitan is cold in the colonial metropole and its pastoral realms, an expression of a deeper uneasiness and un-homeliness for some of the authors. Rhys and Smith, in particular, describe their distress frequently and in direct terms in their diaries and letters; the former, in particular, writes about her fear of the cold and the desire to get away from it, and of extended periods of illness that hamper her writing, as she becomes an itinerant across Beckenham, Croydon, Lexington, and, ultimately, a place she comes to call “Blasted Bude.”¹³ Both Smith and Rhys use the same phrase (“I long for warmth”), Rhys seeking to soak up the sun and Smith the comfort of both the sunshine and “the welcome of friends.”¹⁴ These experiences of the corporeal cosmopolitan who is the modernist woman author are, in their own words, crucial to their aesthetic technologies.

Forever Foreigner, Forever but Differently White

The most immediate form of identification of these authors, in literature, has been by nationality – New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, and the West Indies. Whiteness remains as an indelible yet unmarked race in the naming of nationality, based in settler colonialism and imperial identification. Race is subsumed into nationality for these authors, given the Dominion status for all but Rhys; when they are in their countries of origin, they already adopt the technologies of Whiteness, for instance, in their early education and in their gaze through which represent various “others.” In their later diaries, when the authors are foreigners in the “Mother Country,” they are keenly aware of themselves as the “other,” and self-consciously practice their craft on that basis, even at the fundamental level of the response to the elements, primarily the cold. The gradual vanishing or erasure by neglect or deliberate omission of the trace of the Indigene confirms their Whiteness. Country of origin plays off against “Mother Country” in ways that Virginia Woolf described as being a “stepdaughter of England” in Three Guineas (1938). However, there is a difference between her claims and the status of these authors – Woolf speaks from the inside, where her citizenship and sense of cultural belonging is the very basis for her claims to create distance between her experience and dominant assumptions about her native-ness.

As a young Pākehā woman in New Zealand, Reference Mansfield and ScottMansfield muses whether she could give a “coherent account” of the history of English literature or of English history and expresses a desire to envision and experience England in the time of Shakespeare (Notebooks 2: 30). This orientation toward England also marks Reference RhysRhys’s “Leaving Dominica” in which she, a young White Creole woman setting out from Bridgetown, Barbados, “very cheerfully,” not only leaves the West Indies and her parents behind but “[forgets] them. They were the past” (Smile Please 76). She draws attention to her authorial inelegance (“How clumsily I’m writing”) when she recalls her anxiety about her inadequate attractiveness in the eyes of the Englishman Mr. Kennaway’s gaze, but also notes that now she is nearly seventeen “there is England, England, England” (Smile Please 137). Then, she encounters exactly the disillusion she had imagined about being in Europe – the dull streets and snobbery about “the proper pronunciation of English” (Smile Please 84). Similarly, in “Leaving England,” Reference RhysRhys reveals that she cannot actually leave England because she did not save up enough; she moves from Bloomsbury to Torrington Square and describes herself as “the only English, or pseudo-English person among Greeks, Italians, Belgian, and South Americans” (Smile Please 109).

Being English-identified is refracted through the author’s experience of otherness; for Rhys and Mansfield, a growing sense of alienation results in a technology of dis-identification and dissociation that brings to the surface traces of that very otherness that had become submerged in their modernist praxes. Reference Mansfield, Kimber and DavisonMansfield laments in 1916 that the plots of her stories leave her “perfectly cold” and that she feels “a ‘sacred debt’” to make “our undiscovered country leap in to the eyes of the world” (Diaries 191). Writing of herself in the third person, in 1919 she calls herself “the little colonial” who is asked what she is doing in a London garden and realizes “[s]he is a stranger – an alien” (Diaries 277–8). Reference Rhys, Wyndham and MellyRhys writes similarly, on December 6, 1949, of being stared at in the village of “Blasted Bude,” imagining that her correspondents must see her as “a raving and not too clean maniac with straws in gruesome unwashed hair” (Letters 64–5). In a letter to Francis Wyndham in September 14, 1959, Reference Rhys, Wyndham and MellyRhys declares that though her great-grandfather was Scot, her father was “Welsh – very,” and her mother’s side was “what we call Creole,” she herself is white, as far as she knows but with “no country really now” (Letters 172, emphasis in original). Similarly, Reference SmithSmith writes to “Sarie,” on October 25, 1949, that looking out over her friends’ garden in Kent, she sees views that remind her of the Karoo veld and “feeling that [she] would never see S. Africa again” (“Letters” 61). She had expressed the same despair to the same correspondent, confessing that she was “homesick for … that part of [her] own country,” Cape Town, and for all the people she knows there (January 20, 1949, Reference SmithSmith, “Letters” 54, emphasis in original). Rhys uses that very word, “homesick” in a letter to Selma Vaz Dias (November 6, 1957).

For the authors in this discussion, being White (in their own cognition) is the basis for their claims to recognition and legitimacy as modernist craftswomen who use the emerging technologies of their times; yet, their Whiteness is, in the eyes of the “Mother Country,” never quite English-White.