Prologue

Abstract

This study takes Doreen Massey’s argument about the relational nature of place (and space) as a starting point for a critical analysis of urban representations in British women’s fiction. My discussion addresses a series of questions about the relationship between lived space and the processes of identity formation, with a view to highlighting potential influences by networks of spatial, social and psychological factors on the ways in which women writers imagine city life.

The identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple. And the particularity of any place is, in these terms, constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counter-position to the other which lies beyond, but … through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond’.

(Massey 5)