Writing the Meal: Dinner in the fiction of early 20th century women writers

McGee traces the importance of dinner in the work of such writers as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield. “In … texts where dinners provide the structure or the content of the work, the social, cultural, and spiritual importance of meals … is evident. Both a creative and a nurturing act, the provision of a meal is a – perhaps the – crucial moment in the fictional world and, moreover, key to the structure of the work of fiction itself.” McGee shows the roles of women in the early twentieth century, and “the political, economic, and class situations that underlie a particular meal, about philosophical issues, about time and death.” A scholarly and absorbing work. mRb