Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century. Its central theme is women's discursive contribution to the construction of colonial nostalgia.

Patricia Lorcin is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, USA. She is the author ofImperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (1995), editor ofAlgeria and France 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, and Nostalgia (2006), and co-editor of several collections of essays includingFrance and its Spaces of War: Experience, Memory, Image (2009).

PART I: 1900-1930. COLONIAL WOMEN AND THEIR IMAGINED SELVES Women and their Colonial Worlds Nostalgia Personified: Isabelle Eberhardt and Karen Blixen PART II: 1920-1940. POLITICAL REALITIES AND FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS Reality Expressed; Reality Imagined: Colonial Women in Twenties Algeria and Kenya Writing and Living the Exotic [The Twenties] Women's Fictions of Colonial Realism [The Thirties] PART III: IMPERIAL DECLINE AND THE REFORMULATION OF NOSTALGIA Nationalist Anger; Colonial Illusions: Women's responses to Decolonization Happy Families, Red Strangers and 'A Vanishing Africa': Nostalgia Comes Full Circle