This book principally coheres around a sense of women’s writing as inseparable from its cultural production. The multi-faceted essays here reveal how feminist criticism changed in one academic’s career from 1986 from the publication of her stellar work, Feminist Criticism. Snapshots discusses theories including ‘the anxiety of influence’, écriture feminine, postmodernism, life-writing all informed by a belief that subjectivity and creativity are integral to non-fiction writing. At the centre of these discussions is the work of Virginia Woolf, whose reputation and scholarly status are unique. The book maps Humm's writing on feminism, visual culture and twentieth-century women’s writing across forty transformative years of criticism. Readers and scholars will benefit from the book’s historical and theoretical range, as well as its autobiographical fragments. It demonstrates how feminists try always to be critically innovative, and the ways in which Maggie Humm's work has opened up new avenues into twentieth-century women’s writing, film and feminist criticism.

"Maggie Humm’s writing is infused with photographic sensibility, taking us to the borderlands between the visual and the literary. Like Woolf in Orlando, she flashes cinematic contrasts before us, opening our eyes to the significance of the fragmentary." - Nino Strachey, author of Young Bloomsbury and Rooms of Their Own

"Maggie Humm’s remarkable book reflects an academic career at the forefront of global feminist scholarship. A pioneering Women’s Studies scholar and renowned Virginia Woolf expert, Humm interweaves feminist criticism and Woolf studies with a deep love of the visual arts, especially photography, illuminating the vital relationship between modernity, visual culture and feminism." - Gerri Kimber, Visiting Professor, University of Northampton, UK