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![]() ![]() My work engages with ideas central to the flourishing field of everyday studies. In grappling with the difficulty of salvaging not only what is unique, and of avoiding imposing on the narrative a teleology that is extraneous to the rhythm of the day, these circadian novels indicate an attempt to inhabit, and tell, the world about the undistinguished of our existence despite the world’s resistance to such attempts. If, as Terry Eagleton recently conceptualised it, the novel form ‘begins to emerge when everyday existence which is its stock in trade becomes newly unstable’ as it was in the ‘early capitalist England’ when Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe (23), then the ‘return’ to the middle manifest in these inter-war texts can be seen to enact a similar response. ![]() Conceived during the ‘middle’ years of their authors’ careers, these novels also centre on middle-aged women who reflect and recover (or not) from the disarray caused by the war (albeit not the same war). Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf A Day Off (1933) by Storm Jameson and One Fine Day (1947) by Mollie Panter-Downes. This paper examines the gendered everyday as manifest in three novels by three women writers: Mrs. ![]()
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