Abstract

This comparative study investigates how Virginia Woolf and Anita Desai articulate feminist subjectivity, agency, and resistance through their fiction and non-fiction, paying special attention to intersections of class, culture, colonial history, religion, and gender. Woolf’s modernist experiments in early 20th-century Britain reconfigure interiority and the politics of writing, while Desai’s post‐independence Indian novels negotiate the legacies of colonialism, tradition, and modern pressures. Employing feminist literary theory (including theories of voice, writing, and gender), narratology and postcolonial feminism, this paper argues that though both authors foreground women’s interior lives and constrained social spaces, they diverge in formal strategies and in how intersectional determinants shape female possibility. By placing Woolf and Desai in dialogue, the research uncovers broader currents in feminist thought across cultures and offers new readings of modernism and postcolonial writing in relation to gender.