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During the interwar period, shifting attitudes toward empire dovetailed with women's achievement of citizenship, placing women at the centre of debates about what England would be. Responding to these cultural conditions, women writers used novels of place to analyze relationships among space, self, and nation in England, thereby establishing new ways for the country to view itself. Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt'sNarrative Settlementsresituates British women's writing between the wars in light of postcolonial theories of the novel and feminist geography. Reading works by Winifred Holtby, Vita Sackville-West, Angela Thirkell, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Nesbitt argues that renewed attention to setting provides a methodological base for a more nuanced understanding of the aesthetic preoccupations of women writers between the wars. She provides not only attentive readings of literature during this contentious time, but a convincing argument for looking beyond modernism to locate the significance of interwar literary production.

Nesbitt discusses Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1926 novel Lolly Willowes, which is increasingly studied as Warner's academic profile rises, but the events following the carefully showcased speech still puzzle critics and readers. Among other things, Warner's novel is a commentary on the semiotics and politics of landscape as a structuring agent in subjectivity and is about whole classes of subjected bodies corralled by an ideology of place naturalized through historical and literary precedent.