“Widening the circle of readers”: Nancy Pearn, professional literary agents, and the serialisation of Flush

This article reconstructs the literary agent Nancy Pearn’s role in the unrealised British serialisation of Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), using correspondence made accessible through the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). It argues that Pearn’s approach of pitching Flush to Lady Rhondda’s Time and Tide was a strategic mediation, and that Leonard Woolf’s rejection of the offer reveals the gendered and classed restrictions in modernist publishing culture. By recovering Pearn’s neglected role, the article shows how literary agents, especially women professionals, helped facilitate the commercial circulation of modernist texts and shape their possible cultural meanings and readerships.