Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.
This volume contributes to the vibrant, ongoing recuperative work on women’s writing by shedding new light on a group of authors commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The neologism ‘interfeminism’ – coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’ – locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst also forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths that have traditionally overshadowed them. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing in its own right, this volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the interwar and postwar periods pave the way for the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterise second and third wave feminism.
The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of a substantial group of women authors of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. Additional exploration of the popular magazines Woman’s Weekly and Good Housekeeping and new material from the Vera Brittain archive add an innovative dimension to original readings of the literature of a transformative period of British social and cultural history.
List of contributors: Natasha Periyan, Eleanor Reed, Maroula Joannou , Lola Serraf, Sue Kennedy, Ana Ashraf, Chris Hopkins, Gill Plain, Lucy Hall, Katherine Cooper, Nick Turner, Maria Elena Capitani, James Underwood, and Jane Thomas.
Trade Review'This new collection of essays is a welcome addition to scholarship on twentieth-century women’s writing. [...] This is a recuperative project that insists on a dismissal of middlebrow from our critical lexicon in favour of an appreciation of ‘interfeminism’. Latent throughout are attempts to answer unspoken questions: did this period produce women’s writing that merits critical attention? And just how innovative was it? Where was its energy? Its revolt? Its exigency? Everywhere, this collection asserts, we just have to read it.'Lydia Fellgett,
Women: A Cultural ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction
Sue Kennedy and Jane Thomas
Part I: Women Within and Beyond: Visions of ‘This Island’ 1930-1960
1. 'Pacifism , Fascism and The Crisis of Civilization’: Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson and Nancy Mitford in the 1930s
Natasha Periyan2. Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Leisure in
Woman’s Weekly, 1930
Eleanor Reed3. ‘Unsettled’ and ‘Unsettling’ Women: Migrant Voices After the War
Maroula Joannou
Part II: Women Bearing Witness: The Temperature of War
4. Supporting and Resisting the Myth of the Blitz: Ambiguity in Susan Ertz's
Anger in the Sky (1943)
Lola Serraf5. ‘The Lure of Pleasure’: Sex and the Married Girl in Marghanita Laski’s
To Bed with Grand Music (1946)
Sue Kennedy6. The Ambivalence of Testimony in
The Heat of the Day (1949), Elizabeth Bowen
Ana Ashraf7. Re-presenting Wrens: Nancy Spain's
Thank you Nelson (1945), Eileen Bigland's
The Story of the WRNS (1946), Vera Laughton Matthews'
Blue Tapestry (1948) and Edith Pargeter's
She Goes to War (1942)
Chris Hopkins
Part III: Women Writing Men: Interwar, War and Aftermath
8. ‘We must feed the men’: Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Maternal Plotting.
Too Dear For My Possessing (1940),
An Avenue of Stone (1947) and
A Summer to Decide (1948)
Gill Plain9. Men of the House: Oppressive Husbands and Displaced Wives in Second World War and Post-War Literature (Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier)
Lucy Hall 10. British Women Writing War: The Case of Storm Jameson
Katherine CooperPart IV: New Realities for Women: A Forward Glance
11. Barbara Comyns and New Directions in Women’s Writing
Nick Turner12. A New Reality: Shelagh Delaney’s
A Taste of Honey (1958)
Maria Elena Capitani13. Stevie Smith: Poetry and Personality
James Underwood14. ‘Whoever She Was’: Penelope Mortimer, Beyond the Feminine Mystique
Jane Thomas
