Between Siblings: Form and Family in the Modern Novel

Abstract

Between Siblings argues that British novels about siblings in the early twentieth century are crucial texts for apprehending the ways writers of the period invoke and rework the genealogical structures of Victorian fiction. Prevailing critical accounts of modernist literature more often describe its wholesale rejection of the family. Edward Said, for example, writes that modernism seeks “new, non-familial ways” to reassemble the world. But the numerous sibling-centered novels of the period complicate the dominant account. Between Siblings recovers the importance of siblings for writers seeking to address a literary tradition in which definitive narrative tropes are bound up with the reproduction of the patriarchal family. I show how writers including George Eliot, E.M. Forster, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf use sibling plots as a means of contending with the legacy of Victorian domestic ideology without replicating its forms.