Texts travel, as do commodities. At the turn of the twentieth century, Anna Snaith reminds us, so did colonial women, albeit in the ‘wrong way’ (1); while British women were often sent to the colonies as part of schemes to deal with the ‘surplus woman problem’ (1), the subjects of Snaith's study move subversively from colonial outposts to the heart of the British imperial metropolis, London. Modernist Voyages is an ambitious attempt to remap modernist genealogies and geographies, to chart journeys without positioning them as relative to the urban centres of London, New York or Paris. Snaith attempts to situate colonial modernist writing as part of multiple and layered imperial networks of political and literary activism, and also to find a place for the long-time dark twin of Literary Studies scholarship, empire, which is present but, more often than not, ignored. Very much in the tradition of the scholarship of Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, Susan Stanford Friedman, Elleke Boehmer and, more recently, Saikat Majumdar, Snaith attempts to ‘colour’ modernism, substantiating claims of its plurality and demonstrating how modernist circles and groups enabled and encouraged the literary production of those from the margins of empire.

While male modernists trickle into the study as ideological targets or intellectual enablers and mentors, the seven case studies that Modernist Voyages comprises focus on a range of women writers from across the imperial world, all of whom spent some time in London, whether or not this was their only journey abroad or the one that had the greatest impact on their work. They range from the now canonical Jean Rhys, Olive Schreiner, Katherine Mansfield and Christina Stead to the critically neglected and under-represented Una Marson, Sara Jeannette Duncan and Sarojini Naidu. Modernist Voyages examines simultaneously the intellectual networks that London afforded these women, the spaces in which their writing was produced and circulated, and the political critiques they articulated, uneven though these often were. By reversing, in the process, the very ‘metropolitan gaze’ (22) of the white modernist writer, Snaith uncovers the different ways in which these women write of London as a coming together of hospitable and inhospitable spaces, of cosmopolitan and conservative pockets. She also shows that some of these women, as in the case of Naidu, made the decision not to write about London at all.