Women employed by the CNA drew upon traditional forms of colonial rhetoric in depicting their experiences, but also adapted these forms in order to reflect their own personal and professional experiences as nurses abroad. Many CNA nurses embraced adventure, independence and professional and physical challenges. For these traits to be accepted and celebrated within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural imagination indicates that the CNA nurse may have revised concepts of female propriety in her own time, which may cause us to question some of our current assumptions about historical gender roles.
Though the sources of disease against which nurses fought changed during this period, we assert that the underlying role of the nurse continued the same: she was meant to use the tools of personal as well as public 'hygiene' to create both physical and cultural boundaries around her white patients and herself, setting colonists apart from their colonial setting.
London's literary and cultural scene fostered newly configured forms of feminist anticolonialism during the modernist period. Through their writing in and about the imperial metropolis, colonial women authors not only remapped the city, they also renegotiated the position of women within the empire. This book examines the significance of gender to the interwoven nature of empire and modernism. As transgressive figures of modernity, writers such as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Una Marson and Sarojini Naidu brought their own versions of modernity to the capital, revealing the complex ways in which colonial identities 'traveled' to London at the turn of the twentieth century. Anna Snaith's timely and original study provides a new vantage point on the urban metropolis and its artistic communities for scholars and students of literary modernism, gender and postcolonial studies, and English literature more broadly.
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