In her autobiographical essay A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf writes that she was born not on 25 January 1882, but “many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past”. These are instincts to protect the self and body against male intrusion; to take ecstatic pleasure in beauty; to seek truth in dreams.
In Selby Wynn Schwartz’s bold and original novel, Woolf is part of a chorus that forms the narrative voice, calling for a collective, transhistoric experience of female being. The book comprises biographical fragments of the lives of historical women, moving us mainly forwards through time from 1880s Italy, where the baby who will grow up to be Italian poet Lina Poletti first throws off her swaddling blanket, to 1920s Paris and London. We encounter Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. Poletti has a leading role and is Schwartz’s great discovery – shape-shifting, visionary, apparently seducing most of the great women of her age.
