While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, 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, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.