John Lehmann’s War Effort: The Penguin New Writing (1940–1950)

John Lehmann’s The Penguin New Writing (1940-1950) is considered one of the finest literary periodicals of World War Two. The journal was committed to publishing writing about all aspects of wartime life, from the front lines to daily civilian struggles, by writers from around the world. It had an engaged readership and a high circulation. This chapter specifically considers Lehmann’s contribution to the wartime heyday for the short story form, through the example of The Penguin New Writing. By examining Lehmann’s editorial approach this chapter reveals the ways he actively engaged with his contributors, teasing and coaxing short stories out of them and contrasts this with the editorial style of Cyril Connolly at rival Horizon magazine. Stories by, and Lehmann’s interactions with, established writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green and Rosamond Lehmann, the emerging writer William Sansom and working-class writers B.L Coombs and Jim Phelan, are the main focus of this chapter. The international outlook of the journal, which promoted satire from China alongside short, mocking works by Graham Greene, is also evaluated as an often overlooked aspect of Lehmann’s venture. Through the short stories and Lehmann’s editorials, this chapter traces how Lehmann sought to shape literature and to elevate the short story form. The chapter concludes by considering how the decline of the short story form in Britain from the 1950s onwards was closely linked to the demise of the magazines which had most actively supported it.

Not Like Old Times: the 1930s to Mid-Century

1920s trends discussed in Chapter 3 continue to figure in the next decade, in which the work of J.W Dunne – loosely connected with the popularity of relativity, and proposing a visionary, pre-cognitive understanding of time – exercised an influence over several contemporary authors. Generally, though, 1930s writing moved away from resistance to the minutely-measured temporalities of the clock and towards broader, often nostalgic encounters of memory with history, with some of Virginia Woolf’s later fiction indicating the nature of the change. The long analepsis in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier provides a paradigm for many nostalgic revisitings, in 1930s fiction, of the supposedly-idyllic Edwardian period – in novels by Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, George Orwell and others. Similar patterns of analepsis and idyllic recollection can be found in writing published during and after the Second World War, by authors including Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, Rosamond Lehmann, L.P Hartley and others. Though still occasionally discernible in fiction later in the century, the pattern fades during the following decades, whose difficulties in recalling affirmatively any period within living memory may have constituted a problem for narrative fiction generally.

Patterns: Rosamond Lehmann

This chapter analyzes the role of fashion as a discursive force in Rosamond Lehmann’s 1932 coming-of-age novel Invitation to the Waltz. Reading the novel alongside such fashion magazines as Vogue, it demonstrates Lehmann’s awareness that 1920s fashion, in spite of its carefully stylized public image as harbinger of originality, emphasized the importance of following preconceived (dress) patterns in the successful construction of modern feminine types. Invitation to the Waltz, it argues, opposes the production of patterned types and celebrates difference and disobedience in its stead. At the same time, the novel’s formal appearance is nonetheless dependent on the very same tenets it criticizes. On closer scrutiny, it is seen to reveal its resemblance to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). A tension between imitation and originality determines sartorial fashion choices. This chapter shows that female authorship in the inter-war period was subjected to the same market forces that controlled and sustained the organization of the fashion industry.

SAME DIFFERENCE? TRANSLATING ‘SENSITIVE TEXTS’

Just like ideas of ‘equivalence’, the concept of ‘sameness’ in translation is not a neutral, univocal one: its interpretation can shift both diachronically and synchronically, with a variety of factors, be they individual or collective, influencing the outcome. This paper intends to investigate a specific example from one author’s work in translation with a view to highlighting the role played by social norms and ideological beliefs in the production and reception of translated texts. Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990) was an English writer, close to the Bloomsbury Set and author of several popular, critically acclaimed novels. However, her ‘scandalous’ narratives – including extra-marital affairs, gay and lesbian characters and abortion – perhaps rather predictably, provoked some strong reactions in Britain. Although all her books were translated with great success in France, it is perhaps surprising that four of her novels were published in Italy during the years of the Fascist regime. This paper outlines the French and Italian versions of The Weather in the Streets, published in 1936 and 1938 respectively, within their historical context.

‘A Journal of the Period’: Modernism and Conservative Modernity in Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial (1919–29)

This chapter examines and puts into context the ‘modernist turn’ of Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a popular fashion magazine marketed to middle-class female readers in the interwar period (1919-1929). While many of its society columns and features unquestionably endorsed traditional, patriarchal values, the fact that editors also reviewed and commissioned work by modernist women writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf, shows that the magazine was fashioned as a dialogic space that aimed to address the various, at times contradictory, experiences and interests of women in the interwar period. By analysing the particulars of this productive dialogue between conservatism and progressiveness in Eve, the chapter advances research on interwar periodical culture, suggesting that some existing critical designations such as ‘little,’ ‘smart,’ or ‘service’ inadequately describe the heterogeneity of the printed materials found in this particular 1920s magazine.

Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers

An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the Flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity’s economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference. For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity. By examining their published work and unpublished correspondence, this book investigates how the chosen authors used fashion terminology to discuss the possibilities available to women to express difference and individuality in a world that actually favoured standardised products and collective formations.