Eret Talviste, Strange Intimacies: Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) viii+231 pp. £90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781399502375
The title Strange Intimacies alludes to intimacy as a literary theme, a critical method, and unconventional ways of living life. The intimacies emerging through embodiment, emotions, and material environments are often affective, more-than-human relations which can sometimes be sensed as uncanny. Through a reappraisal of intimacy, Eret Talviste studies Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys to examine forms of attachment that exceed interpersonal or Oedipal relations. Each chapter is devoted to a novel: Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931),and Between the Acts (1941), and Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934),and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Her approach mixes close textual analysis, affect theory, feminist philosophy, and new materialism. The thematic arrangement of various affective registers such as wonder, yearning, friendship, haunting, and belonging each employ sensory experiences shaped by war, displacement, and gendered vulnerability.
The chapter on To the Lighthouse converges intimacy most directly with questions of knowledge. Talviste begins with Lily Briscoe’s reflection on intimacy as inseparable from knowing the other (38), using it to unsettle the division between affective closeness and cognitive understanding. She grounds wondering as an intimate act where thinking is closer to wonder(ing) (45). Drawing on ‘wonder’ and Jane Goldman’s feminist reading of Woolfian perception, she situates wonder in the everyday ethics of care. Goldman’s ‘feminist prismatics’ (40) enables her to read the emergence of new intimacies in Mrs Ramsay’s character where she is no more an Oedipal anchor but an iridescent, refractive presence, establishing the terms through which intimacy can be approached beyond familial and normative forms.
In the second chapter, intimacy in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie appears through yearning, positioning life outside Oedipal framings of desire. Julia’s separation from Mr Mackenzie causes the shattering of illusion, enabling her a curious existence. Talviste points out the seemingly dismal and grim plot; at a deeper level, the yearning for life which is most explicitly showcased by Julia. Bringing Rhys in dialogue with Woolf’s ‘Chloe liked Olivia’, she contrasts Woolf’s vision of female solidarity with Rhys’s portrayal of stranger female intimacies as totally bereft of material precarity and residual Oedipal structures. Thus, through Hélène Cixous’s idea of descent, Talviste reads Rhys’s novel as moving ‘outside’ the organized society toward beings deemed unclean—certain women, birds, and other marginal forms of life (86).
Chapter 3 positions The Waves as an explicit exploration of ‘non-familial, horizontal threads of friendship’ (96), where vertical logics of Oedipal narratives are displaced and intimacy unfolds among Bernard, Susan, Neville, Jinny, Louis, and Rhoda. Aiming to decipher Woolf’s concept of friendship, Talviste delves into her lived friendships with Violet Dickinson, Vita Sackville-West and other Bloomsbury members which seeped into her ‘aesthetics, politics and philosophy’ (99). Talviste notes this friendship exists within embodied relationality as opposed to the Greek ideal of male fraternity. This poststructuralist–posthumanist approach and the flesh–body duality allows Percival’s abstraction, underscoring Woolf’s refusal to grant flesh to the heroic male centre, reinforcing her emphasis on intimate friendship grounded in embodied relationality (107).
Next, Talviste places Voyage in the Dark within the logic of haunting that is at once affective and corporeal. Framing a displaced white creole woman’s memories as both spectral and somatic, she positions the text where colonial displacement and feminist intimacy become distinct through the ‘viscerality of ghosts’ (129). The interpretation of Anna’s ‘non-belonging, non-arriving and visceral haunting as sites of ideological critique’ (131), helps Talviste incorporate Homi Bhabha’s ‘unhomely’. Explaining the structural effect of colonial hierarchies, she extends Cixous’s ‘unexpected sisters’ to ‘missing people’ erased from colonial archives such as Anne Chewett, Meta, and Maillotte Boyd (137). These missing people appear through fragments of slave lists, remembered names, and half-articulated memories, forming what she reads as a submerged archive of suppressed lives and intimacies (138).
Chapter 5 studies Between the Acts, which Talviste notes as the most sensual of Woolf’s novels. She contends that the sensual openness that produces communal feeling can also register violence—imperial, sexual, and ecological—as intimacy circulates not only between individuals but also through the shared materiality of bodies and environments. Showing Woolf’s placement of affective relations within the material landscape of an English village, Talviste links the village pageant’s challenge to patriarchal narratives of historiography to Cixous’s notion of ‘time’s horizon line’, where history emerges from lived experience rather than patriarchal lineage (159). Woolf also contrasts imperial mastery with an ecological awareness of deep time through Bart’s imperial mentality and Lucy’s attention to prehistory and land. Talviste argues that the novel reimagines Englishness as material instead of an abstract imperial identity where intimacy emerges as a web of relations, reshaping national history within embodied encounters.
The final chapter on Wide Sargasso Sea interprets Antoinette’s attachment to the Caribbean landscape as a relation grounded in embodied relationality with the place rather than in nationality or colonial identity. Talviste reads the novel as Rhys’s attempt to ‘write a life’ for Bertha Mason by restoring Antoinette’s attachment to the environment that animates her existence (189). She claims that Rhys’s final novel forms a prequel to all of Rhys’s other novels as it demonstrates her heroines’ ‘love for life’ before it is debilitated by various worldly factors. Drawing on Martin Hägglund’s ‘chronolibido’, Talviste argues that Antoinette’s love for life emerges precisely through the knowledge that it can be lost. She argues that Rhys dismantles imperial epistemology from within by staging multiple ways of knowing—embodied, Indigenous, feminist, and Western—while affirming belonging as an affective relation between body and land (199). She connects Rhys’s attempt to rewrite Bertha Mason’s life with Jane Goldman’s idea of the future as a ‘laboratory of intimacy’, where previously unspeakable relations between races, genders, and environments may become narratable (204).
One of the monograph’s most compelling contributions is its attention to materiality as a mode of reading modernist fiction. Writing against narratives of modernity as increasingly disenchanted and disembodied, Talviste argues that modernist fictions of Woolf and Rhys repeatedly return to the body as a site through which intimacy is reconfigured. Placing two compelling authors such as Woolf and Rhys together, Strange Intimacies brings their modernisms in dialogue and suggests that both develop alternative models of relational intimacy that challenge hierarchical structures of knowledge, history, and community. Talviste’s study’s engagement with affect theory and feminist philosophy allows it to trace connections between literary form, ethical relation, and historical experience. At times, the theoretical framework is dense and the breadth of philosophical references occasionally outpaces the close readings. Nevertheless, the book’s comparative structure offers a nuanced way of rethinking intimacy as affective and embodied within modernist studies.
Samriddhi Singh, Banaras Hindu University
