Experimental lives

"Women's experience in the first half of the twentieth century was shaped by changes in their legal status, education, employment, and by their struggle for a redefinition of themselves and their place in society. Rejecting the literary and cultural assumptions of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, women novelists, poets, and playwrights of the modernist period used such innovations as shifting narrators, unconventional plots, imagism and symbolism, and the interior monologue to challenge literary and social traditions. Women of this experimental literary period--diverse writers ranging…