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Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Maroula Joannou 2013 Individual chapters © contributors 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–28279–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Contents Series Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgements x Notes on the Contributors xi Chronology 1920–1945 xiv Introduction: Modernism, Modernity, and the Middlebrow in Context 1 Maroula Joannou Part I Mapping Modernism 1 Gender in Modernism 23 Bonnie Kime Scott 2 Exemplary Intermodernists: Stevie Smith, Inez Holden, Betty Miller, and Naomi Mitchison 40 Kristin Bluemel 3 Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Modernism 57 Jane Goldman 4 The Art of Bi- Location: Sylvia Townsend Warner 78 Maud Ellmann Part II Cultural Hierarchy 5 The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 97 Nicola Humble 6 Women and Comedy 112 Sophie Blanch 7 The Woman’s Historical Novel 129 Diana Wallace 8 ‘Queens of Crime’: The ‘Golden Age’ of Crime Fiction 144 Cora Kaplan Part III Gendered Genres 9 Poetry, 1920–1945 161 Jane Dowson 10 Drama, 1920–1945 182 Rebecca D’Monté vii Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 viii Contents 11 The Woman Journalist, 1920–1945 199 Catherine Clay Part IV The Mobile Woman 12 Caught in the Triple Net? Welsh, Scottish, and Irish Women Writers 217 Katie Gramich 13 Women’s Writing in the Second World War 233 Gill Plain 14 Women Writing Empire 250 Lisa Regan 15 Women Writing the City 264 Deborah Longworth 16 Myths of Passage: Paris and Parallax 275 Tory Young Electronic Resources 291 Select Bibliography 292 Index 304 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Introduction: Modernism, Modernity, and the Middlebrow in Context Maroula Joannou Literary Modernism and women’s writing, 1920–1945 This book discusses a broad spectrum of writing by women much of which is not widely- known, including forgotten drama, narratives of empire, opinion- shaping journalism, poetry originally published in small maga- zines, feminine middlebrow fiction, historical novels, and popular crime fiction. The women writers in this book are important to our understand- ing of which aspects of modernity we privilege in constructing narratives to account for the literary production of the early and middle years of the twentieth century. The majority of women whose work is discussed in volume eight of Palgrave’s History of British Women’s Writing do not fit into a recognized version of the modernist canon. Their complex and often troubled relationship to modernity – as readers, consumers, and travellers at home and abroad – requires new critical frameworks in which to discuss their writing as well as a revision of the territory that has been staked out as the preserve of Modernism by critical theory and practice. The historical period from 1920 to 1945 is coterminous with the great achievements of literary Modernism dating approximately from the annus mirabilis of 1922, which saw T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, to the publication of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake at the apex of ‘high Modernism’ in 1939. The canonical literary history of Britain in these years has been dominated by the towering figures of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf who, in the spirit of Pound’s celebrated injunc- tion to ‘Make it New’,1 set their backs to the conventions of Victorian literature. Such key works as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) or Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1920) signalled a radical break with the literary past and an attempt to find new literary techniques to represent consciousness in ways appropriate to the changing understandings of the physical universe and psychic identity. Einstein’s theory of relativity altered traditional under- standings of space and time and Freud’s work on the unconscious focused 1 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 2 The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 attention on the complexities of the inner psychic life. The revolutionary new insights afforded by the visual arts, psychology, anthropology, mathe- matics, and the physical sciences in the early twentieth century dramatically transformed the work of artists, musicians, architects, and writers. As Woolf put it, after visiting the Post- Impressionist Exhibition in London, ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’.2 These changes in the perception of consciousness affected women writers profoundly, and in her path- breaking Women of the Left Bank (1986)3 Shari Benstock argued that Gertrude Stein, H.D., Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and others were modernists, in the sense that like Joyce and Pound they were avant- garde writers and bohemian expatriates. But they were also significantly different from their male counterparts in that they did not live conventional heterosexual lives, some being lesbian or bisexual, and were sustained by female friendship networks that gave them the freedom to express non- normative textual and sexual identities. Situated in Paris these women invested in new ways of writing to liberate themselves from gendered restrictions upon their freedoms. Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1919), discussed here by Tory Young, has been termed ‘modernism’s lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition’4 by the critic, Julia Briggs. Preceding The Waste Land, to which it has some resemblances, by three years, Paris enjoyed nothing of the critical recognition that The Waste Land received on first publication and subsequ- ently lapsed into obscurity. The writing of the period 1920–1945 is exceedingly varied and the stylistic innovative features that we associate critically with Modernism represent one set of tendencies that existed alongside and in tension with many others. The term Modernism was still relatively new and unfamiliar and many writers, such as E.H. Young, Rosamond Lehmann, Storm Jameson, and Vera Brittain, considered it irrelevant to themselves. The authors discussed by Sophie Blanch (comedy), Nicola Humble (the feminine middlebrow novel), Rebecca D’Monté (theatre), and Diana Wallace (the historical novel), were distinctly modern in such respects as style, outlook, and social attitudes. They were not, however, modernists in that their writing refused both the avant- garde rupture with the literary past and the male modernists’ cultural devaluation of femininity. Moreover, they sought to deal with the contradic- tions of modern life by writing outside the framework of Modernism. In A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914–39 (1984)5 Nicola Beauman identified a significant body of fiction written by women between the wars that she termed the ‘woman’s novel’; that is, a type of woman- centred narrative written and avidly read, purchased, and enjoyed by, middle- class women like Laura Jesson in Brief Encounter (1947). Interest in such woman- centred fiction flourished during the 1970s and 1980s with the establishment of The Women’s Press in the United States in 1978, and Virago, a feminist publishing collective in Britain in 1973, making reprints Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–28279–7 Modernism, Modernity, and the Middlebrow in Context 3 of ‘modern classics’ available to a new generation of women readers. In 1998 Beauman achieved a remarkable personal triumph with the successful launch of her new company, Persephone Books, which includes Dorothy Whipple, Cicely Hamilton, and other women whom Beauman had discussed in A Very Great Profession in its rapidly expanding catalogue. Alison Light’s influential Forever England (1991) accounted for the ways in which Ivy Compton- Burnett, Agatha Christie, Jan Struther, and Daphne Du Maurier were able to accommodate the past in the forms of the present and suggested that the feminized ‘conservative modernity’ that characterized the interwar period represented a qualitatively different kind of conservatism.6 Taking up Light’s invitation to engage critically with the contradictions and tensions of ostensibly conservative literary texts Rebecca D’Monté discusses plays for the mainstream theatre which have received little critical attention because they were considered intellectually lightweight in much the same way as Coward, Rattigan, and Priestley.