Sisters in Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Masako Hirai

   Pages 1-7

3. The Common Doom

   • Masako Hirai

   Pages 8-24

4. Reading Antigone

   • Masako Hirai

   Pages 25-40

5. Middlemarch: From Heroic Legend to Emotional History

   • Masako Hirai

   Pages 41-76

6. Howards End: From Letters to a Connecting Vision

   • Masako Hirai

   Pages 77-120

7. Women in Love (1): The Disruptive Style, its Images and Arguments

   • Masako Hirai

   Pages 121-168

8. Women in Love (2): The Language Between

   • Masako Hirai

   Pages 169-210

9. Back Matter

   Pages 211-221

   PDF

A unique study of how novels by Lawrence, Forster and George Eliot can be read as rewritings of Sophocles's Antigone : each is presented as a socially and sexually involving argument between two sisters. The author provides an interconnected case-study where each text works on the hidden meanings of the other. Female sexuality, expressed through the language of duality (vulnerability, frustration, submission and destructivity, consummation and rebirth), becomes an ideal vehicle for crossing the barriers between sexes and between societies, as between the texts themselves.

• bibliography
• English literature
• female sex
• George Eliot
• history
• history of literature
• knowledge
• language
• literature
• love
• novel
• Ovid
• Sophocles
• style
• women

'Admirably done, extremely perceptive and very well written. The connections she finds between novels under discussion are genuine, and illuminating, and her book will be of interest to all who value as central to the English novel tradition the works of George Elliot, E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence.' - Sir Frank Kermode

• English Department, Kobe College, Nishinomiya, Japan

  Masako Hirai

Masako Hirai is Professor in the English Department at Kobe University in Nishinomiya, Japan.

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