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Cusk’s own experimental drive arises anew from the old dissatisfactions with what Woolf called “the machinery of fiction,” combined with a similar devotion, nonetheless, to the examination of people, relationships, and sociopolitical “forms” (Levine).

The marked stylistic departure of The Outline Trilogy, I argue, arises from an even deeper neomodernist engagement, a reckoning with the fundamental narrative discontents that underlay Woolf’s experimentalism. Literary modernism’s shaping force on Cusk’s writing is attested to in her essays and interviews, and the Woolfian affinities of her earlier novels have been recognized. This essay examines Rachel Cusk’s remarkable and widely lauded Outline Trilogy, aiming to clarify the nature, significance, and lineage of its experimental form.