Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism

Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism takes an exciting new approach to women's writing of the early twentieth century. It argues that novels by authors including Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein can be productively described as romans clef (or 'novels with a key'), which encrypt same-sex desire in order to avoid censorship and represent the seemingly unrepresentable. Nair suggests that authors of Sapphic modernism used the roman clef genre to structure a complex address -- one that encrypted personal references and directed them toward a private or coterie audience while simultaneously attracting a more mainstream readership. This book acknowledges that a sense of loss and shame characterizes much 'queer' writing of the period, but it argues that in the case of Sapphic romans clef, encrypted personal expressions of longing and desire took on an elegiac tone, and offered a celebration of same-sex desire via the insistence that it be taken seriously.