‘The Lure of Pleasure’

Sue Kennedy considers how Marghanita Laski’s provocative novel To Bed with Grand Music addresses the fantasy of fulfillable desires through the story of a young, married woman taking advantage of everything available in the ‘lucid abnormality’ of London during World War Two. This interfeminist counter-narrative of the protagonist’s libidinal life and her failure to perform as a good mother and faithful wife deviates from the propaganda of the People’s War rendering Laski’s undermining of this ideal at a raw moment in the nation’s psyche contentious. The essay considers the representation of the actions of a young woman and questions whether she is deserving of admiration or censure for her refusal to conform to expectations of feminine conduct. It suggests that her progress is in many ways more eighteenth than mid-twentieth century in tone presenting a woman who begins by embracing her own pleasure but later engages in ‘infamous commerce’.

Lower-middle-class Domestic Leisure in Woman’s Weekly, 1930

Eleanor Reed explores the status of domestic leisure in issues of Woman’s Weekly during 1930 when many middle-class housewives looked to labour-saving technologies to produce status-defining domestic leisure. Woman’s Weekly initiates and reflects the aspirations and anxieties of a readership eager to cement its position in an expanding, diversifying and competitive middle class. The magazine’s lower-middle-class distinctiveness emerges through comparison to Good Housekeeping, a glossy domestic monthly targeting middle-class housewives with larger budgets. Rather than following Pierre Bourdieu and others in portraying lower-middle-class culture as an inauthentic copy of leisure-class culture, this essay argues that Woman’s Weekly contributes to the production of an ideologically distinctive lower-middle-class domestic culture in which its readers can take pride. This culture is problematized however by its suspected source in the magazine’s unknown producers, some of whom were men; a circumstance alluded to in Stevie Smith’s 1936 Novel on Yellow Paper.

Supporting and Resisting the Myth of the Blitz

Heavily mythologized at the time, the London Blitz is still memorialized in ways that sustain a sense of national pride. The concept was initiated by Angus Calder in The People’s War (1969) which succeeded in bolstering what it attempted to debunk. Lola Serraf uses Susan Ertz’s Anger in the Sky (1943) to reconsider the ‘Myth of the Blitz’, showing how the novel explores conflicting intellectual arguments for, and justifications of, war and airs differing perspectives on British pressure for active American military involvement. Serraf rejects the categorization of Ertz’s novel as propaganda by foregrounding opposing discourses through the conflicting voices of her characters. Calder’s revision of his ideas The Myth of the Blitz, almost half a century after Ertz’s description of the devastating effects of the Blitz on London and on outlying rural English life, helped to deconstruct the image of a wholly patriotic country united in adversity.

The Ambivalence of Testimony in Elizabeth Bowen’s

Ana Ashraf’s exploration of Bowen’s novel demonstrates how, in the post-war milieu, ambivalent narratives of testimony and witnessing challenged the ideology of war and the machinery of propaganda. The novel’s metafictional style emphasizes the self-reflexive nature of witness and testimony. Interweaving personal and political spheres in an experimental form that juxtaposes the classic romance plot and the traditional spy novel, The Heat of the Day offers a feminine view of the masculine world of intelligence. In its presentation of the conflict between love and patriotism, the novel’s treatment of treachery appears unstable and unusual. It also highlights the role of literary testimony in challenging the dominant narrative of war. Demonstrating the ‘intermodern’ preoccupation with political commitment during periods of war, the novel exemplifies an ‘interfeminist’ awareness of the notion of ‘women’s time’, the marginalisation of women’s experience of war and the binary division between fact and fiction.

Re-presenting Wrens

Chris Hopkins focuses on how wartime participation in the Wrens was represented during and immediately after the war by exploring the written forms in which Wrens were characterized and how these forms were put into the wider context of wartime popular writing about servicemen and particularly about the Royal Navy. Writing about women’s service experience has not yet been adequately studied, though a significant number of women took part. The essay deals with some of the documentary writing that forms a rich context for the only wartime novel written by a servicewoman about the Wrens, Edith Pargeter's She Goes to War (1942), a Naval fiction/documentary unexpectedly engaging with the agenda of the People's War. The essay argues that this neglected writing tells a significant story about women in war-time Britain and as such is important for understanding the experience of servicewomen, opening debates about society, gender and class.

A New Reality

Focussing on the crucial transitional year of 1958, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey offers a valuable and often overlooked contribution to the genre of ‘kitchen sink drama’. Nevertheless, as Maria Elena Capitani demonstrates, Delaney surpasses her ‘angry young male’ counterparts in her exploration of more of the preoccupations of the 1960s including homosexuality, mixed-race sex, teenage pregnancy and the survival techniques of an ‘underclass’. Capitani observes how A Taste of Honey has the unique capacity to register an epoch-defining moment in British social and cultural history at the same time as it expresses the ‘suffering of ambivalence’, to use Adrienne Rich’s term, of motherhood.

Barbara Comyns and New Directions in Women’s Writing

Focussing on Barbara Comyns’ first three novels, published between 1947 and 1956, Nick Turner asserts the originality of an undeservedly neglected writer. Comyns anticipates the female gothic and the Second Wave feminist impulse through her oppressed and vulnerable female characters. The essay suggests Comyns’ writing is innovative and challenging in three ways: firstly, for the way her depiction of domestic space, settings and movement, coupled with the notions of marriage, motherhood and family life, contests the status quo; secondly, for the manner in which the novels place the animal world in close proximity to the human world; and thirdly, for the nature of her comedy - black, surreal, anarchic. Demonstrating how Comyns at times engages with impressionist and surrealist art permits a consideration of her writing in the context of a so far minor tradition in British women’s literature and art, exemplified by Leonora Carrington.

‘Unsettled and Unsettling’ Women Migrant Voices After the War

Mary Joannou examines the place of London as a haven for English-speaking exiles and émigrés and questions the extent to which it is possible to separate English literature from the literature of the rest of the world as post-war globalization destabilized, de-territorialized and de-colonized Englishness. For the five migrant women writers addressed here - Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, and Kamala Markandaya – the attractions of migration to London, albeit bomb-damaged and shortage riven after the war, far outweighed the drabness of the environment of the metropolis. The new migrants, all politically on the left and strong upholders of freedom of speech and universal human rights, made a significant contribution to the enrichment and expansion of Britain’s literary culture in the 1940s and 1950s which was well-served by thriving post-war publishing and media industries.

‘We Must Feed the Men’

Gill Plain interrogates the trend towards domestic heteronormativity post World War Two in the light of the complex and profound disorientation of women’s post-war lives. She identifies a pervasive sense of personal, social and cultural loss, following the ‘smothering’ of wartime expectations, that often extended beyond the heterosexual matrix. Where ‘male’ plots reprogrammed masculine identity through purposeful activity beyond the home, the absence of plot in women’s fiction signals a lack of interest in the post-war rebuilding of the normative feminine psyche. The ‘resistant plotting’ of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s post-war trilogy, and its emphasis on the urgency of maternity, exhibits a turn toward the gothic. Male damage is offset by female guilt and the onset of a second childhood in her male characters, leading to a narrative of remasculinization. The largely absent figure of the child in post war narratives suggests a generation in mourning for its abruptly foreclosed childhood.

Introduction

British Women’s Writing 1930-1960: Between the Waves offers new insights into writing by women in the middle third of the twentieth century. The neologism ‘interfeminism’ facilitates the reassessment of fictional and non-fictional writing previously overshadowed by the cultural and social monoliths of modernism, postmodernism and first and second wave feminism. Often critically overlooked or out of print, these writers reveal a literary-historical and contemporary feminist significance that has only recently been recognised. While it is assumed that the authors discussed here largely identified and were recognised as women, many were engaged in actively challenging or consciously constructing the social norms that facilitated this recognition through their depiction of the domestic and public space. Close readings underpinned by a range of theoretical concepts and archival research map uncharted cultural space and reveal the dynamism and innovation of a period of assumed literary and political quiescence.