The 'Gospel of Detachment': Remembrance, Exile, and Engagement in Women's Lives and Writing in England Between the Wars.

Daragh D. Catherine Russell

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Daihousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 1998

O Copyright by Daragh D. Catherine Russell, 1998 National Library Bibiioaièque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Aaquisitions et 51biiiraphicSeMces senrices bibliographiques 395 welbgton Street 395, Ne we)nngtm OttawaON K1AW OttawaON K1AW Canada Canada

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une Licence non exclusive licence dowing the exciusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distriiute or sell reproduire, prêter, distri'buer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de micdche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format élecironique.

The author retams ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts f?om it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation.

Canada This thesis is dedicated to Florence Olden Haggarty (1914--), and to the memory of Blanche Gosse Russell (191 7-1 986). Table of Contents

Abstract

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Noncombatants and Survivors.

2 Testaments of a Generation? Women's War Memoirs and the Problem of Authority.

3 'Detached Cornmitment': Ferninism, Tirne And Tide, and Winifred Holtby.

4 'And on Whose Side are You?': Storm Jameson, Stevie Smith, and the Politicised Literature of the 1930s

5 Conclusion

Bibliography ABSTRACT

Politics and literary culture in Britain between the wars (1919 - 1939) were deeply informed by the impact of the Great War, yet relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship of women to the war. It has been generally accepted that the experience of war had a profoundly aiienating effect upon the men of the war generation; convenely, the non-experience of war resulted in the engagement of women with the damaged post-war world. This thesis is concerned with examining certain texts by four female British writen: Vera Brittain. Winifred Holtby, Stom Jameson, and Stevie Smith, in an attempt to discern how middle class women remembered the war, and how their ambiguous relationship to it informed their writing and social conscience. Literary texts are of use as an historical tool not only because they reveal how feminine experience was informed by the accidents of history, but also because they help to shape cultural and social formation and change. Chapter 1, the introduction, discusses the development of academic and emotional considerations of the First World War by describing its cultural implications in Bntain, particularly in relation to modernism and the role of women. The inability of women to fully participate in the experience of warfare led to the development of a uniquely female literary and political voice. By exercising their detachment from the war, they were able to articulate a criticism of culture and society with the insight of the observer rather than the participant. closely uniting the personal with the political. Chapter 2 compares two war memoin, by Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson, in an attempt to examine how women approached the problem of writing subjective accounts of the war, and the consciousness of their ambiguous authority in so doing. Both texts are resonant with the emotional power of the Great War's 'lost generation' of young men, and provide insight into the process of how we have mernorialised the war itself. Chapter 3 examines the fiction and journalism of Winifred Holtby in the context of the feminist weekly Tirne And Tide, a paper with which she was closely connected throughout her prolific career and short life. The paper itself provides a locus for investigation of the changing nature of feminism in the intewar period. Holtby's work exemplifies the 'gospel of detachment', i.e. the challenge she believed the war had posed to women, yet the persona1 conflict inherent in her work reflects the complications of that challenge for poiitics and feminism. Chapter 4 looks at the politicised literature of the 1930s and the rise of Fascisrn through the work of Storm Jameson and Stevie Smith. Both authors refiect a passionate anti-Fascism in their indiament of 'the power of crueity', yet make use of radically different forms to approach their subject, linking the use of language with engagement in the shifting social and cultural forces of the period. Each woman made use of their detachment from the experience of war in a manner which allows for a subtle and uniquely discursive approach to questions of gender and politics discussed here. Acknowledgments

I am foremost grateful to Dr. Stephen Brooke, who first encouraged my interest in the use of literary texts as an historical tool. and without whose unflagging support in the face of migraines. appendicitis and other un-natural disasters I may well have thrown in the towel at the eleventh hour. Thanks are also due to the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Dalhousie University, for the award of a research development grant. and to the British Museum's Colindale Newspaper Library in London, for permission to view the archives of Time And Ede; to Jennifer Dickinson for her kind permission to use her unpublished dissertation Women Novelists and War (1980). and to her husband. Dr. Harry Dickinson of the University of Edinburgh. who informed me of his wife's work. photocopied. and mailed me the relevant chapters. To Michael Pick. Mary Evans MacLachlan, and Brenda and Neville Russell, who have taught me how to approach this project with patience and zeal, my love and thanks.

vii -1 - Introduction: Noncombatants and Survivors

Her's is not an agreeable book; it is one not likely to be popular wrth a public which finds heroism more congenial than justice; but it is a point of view which demands consideration. If the creed of the combatant cannot face this gospel of detachment, stated as it is stated here with force, dignity and satire, then it must declare itself defeated. - Winifred Holtby, The Gospel of Detachment', Time and Tide, June 1 7,1930

Basil never spoke of the trenches, but I Saw them always...

- Stevie Smith, A Soldier Dear to Us

It has become cliché, when discussing the First World War, to speak in ternis of watenheds. For many historians the war remains the defining moment of twentieth century British culture and society. Even if it was not a cataclysm, it served to escalate and metamorphose forces of change already present in 1914, forces which challenged the values, mores, and security of the Victorian period. By the time of the Armistice there was undeniably a gulf, real or imagined, separating the golden summer of August 1914 from the grey winds of November 1918. Modris

Eksteins, describing the fervour of excitement that possessed the cities of Paris,

Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and London in the days surrounding the declaration of war, explains the imaginative significance of the 'guns of August' thus: The days of that summer were long and full of sunshine; the nights were mild and moonlit. That it was a beautiful and unforgettable season is part of the lore of that summer of 1914, part of its poignancy and mystique. Yet it is not to evoke Sun and spas, sailing regattas and somnolent afternoons - important as such imagery is for that sense of that summer before the storm - ...it is very simply because the fine days and nights of that July and August encouraged Europeans to venture out of their homes and display their emotions and prejudices in public, in the streets and squares of their cities and towns. 1

Eksteins goes on to speculate that events might have occurred very differently had the surnmer been cold and damp: that the jingoism displayed by the crowds during the moment of crisis helped to push "the political and military leadership of Europe toward confrontationn.* This sense of calrn before the storm, and the passionate response to the potential conflict were experienced en masse in England. Yet such sentiments hardly appeared in a vacuum; there were many shadows in the

Edwardian afternoon which were encroaching upon public sensibility long before the Serbian 'provocationf of international mobilisation. The pathos and nostalgia of Philip Larkin's phrase 'Never such innocence again' is an eloquent description not only of one of the prevailing 'myths' of the Great War, that of the loss of innocence, but also of the huge divide that was perceived as separating pre- and post-war culture and society in Britain. Yet the nature of that change was nothing if not complicated and qualified; nowhere is this better illustrated than by the

1 Modris Eksteins, Rites of S~rina:The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Aae (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989). pp. 55-6.

Philip LaMn, 'MCMXIV, quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Mem~ry(London: Univerçity of Oxford Press, 1975), p. 19. deeply ambivalent status of English women at the end of the war.

I begin in November 1918 for two reasons. It is a date significant not simply because it marked the Armistice. but also because earlier that year the

Representation of the People Act had granted wornen over thirty the right to vote

in national elections. Further, this date allows one to set up a demarcation between pre- and post-war culture before discussing female experience of the war itself.

Such a significant 'advance' in the lives of women profoundly altered the face of feminism and posed challenges unforeseen by suffragists before 1914. At the same time, in a world that had only just begun to recover from the prolonged crisis of four years of war. women had a unique role to play in its afterrnath.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian period England enjoyed her security as the world's dominant imperial power and prided herself upon the virtues of civilised humanity that had made Britain great at home and abroad. Yet throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century vanous forces were agitating for change, creating an uncertainty and dissatisfaction which disnirbed the calm of such apparently unruffied complacency. The Chartist 'failure' of 1848 gave rise to a nascent working class socialism which was partly supported by the sirnultaneous development of social democratic thought among the middle classes. The possibilities of resistance and reform had entered the landscape of political dynamic, and were reflected in the new willingness of the Liberal party to unite 4 social and political ref~rrns.~The Liberal government elected in 1906 effected significant reforms, including the institution of state-supplied milk for infants and school dinnen for children (1906), the Old Age Pensions Act of 19ûû and the

National Insurance Act of 191 1.'~he Labour party, founded in 1900, emerged from the loosely allied politics of trade unionism and other socialist organisations (such as the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation). It was an uniquely

English form of radicalism which reflected the contemporary tension between complacency and dissatisfaction. a trade union party, it was hampered by a lack of political clarity which kept it from posing any real challenge to liberal ideology. or of providing real incentive for the working class vote until 191 4. Its cornmitment to the inherited institutions of society resulted in an 'evolutionary' process of change within existing political struciures. The war gave Labour the opportunity to develop into a national political party in several ways. The coalition government gave its leaders their first experience in the corridon of power. The adoption of a more ideologically socialist platform helped to further integrate working class interests with the trade union movement. Wage inflation and the rise of unskilled labour through war work provided a language of self-interest and appealed to a more hornogeneous body of the working class. By 1918, the party had become a significant political force, but was unable to respond adequately to the new polity and the changing concept of civil rights. The idea of laissez-faire , with its

4 See, for example, Margot Finn, Aiter Chartisrn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Joanna Bourke, Workina Class Cultures in Britain. 18-1 960. (London: RouUedge. 1994) p.13. 5 undentanding of the individual's autonomous relationship to the state. collapsed during the war. Simultaneously, the new-found confidence of labour and the trade unions to demand change led to the most militant period of strike action in the fint half of the century, lasting from 1917 until the general strike in 1926.

Before 1914. rnovement for resistance and reforrn had taken place in a multiplicity of other ways. The new 'mass politics' created by the Refom Acts of

1867 and 1884. although more dernocratic in theory than in reaiity. reflected the changing notions of the nature of citizenship and community which characterise the nineteenth century. Moreover, they compounded the tensions between class and party, and further articulated the "struggle between ... two visions of the political nation: between a limited, masculine, property-based polity rooted in a protestant and Anglo-saxon vision of history (dentinged with classical republicanism); and a comprehensi~e~pluralist polity based on citizens as individuals, open to al1 corners. "

By 1914 two major issues reflecting these dual visions occupied the front lines of debate: the Irish question and the women's Suffrage movement; the latter is important in the development of the present thesis.

The changing status of women from the laté Victorian to the interwar periods has had a profound impact on the course of British society in the twentieth

JO% Harris, Private Lives. Public S~iritBritain 1870-1914 (Hamondsworth: Penguin Books 1994), p. 16. 6

century, yet the 'progress' of women could never be called straightforward. The

debate concerning women's roles and rights has been a question of public

discoune since the 1860s. when women began to demand access to higher

education and the franchise. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the education

of middle-to-upper-class Englishwomen consisted - in varying degrees, depending

on wealth and position - of French, drawing, music, dancing, modelling (Le.

sculpture) millinery and dressma king, al1 with the explicit intention of creating

civilised wives, mothers and sisters. There were by way of exception a few schools for girls with the same c~rriculumas was taught to boys, although sewing and

knitting substituted for mathematics and ~atin.' At best, women's access to

knowledge and thence to culture and society was complicated and limited throughout the nineteenth century.

According to the ideology of separate spheres, women occupied the

domestic and subservient realm of the private, while men were the guardians of the

public wodd of work, politics, and society at large. The idea that the sexes fall into

different roles ordained by nature is deeply rooted in western civilisation; yet its

social authority developed out of the patriarchal ordering of political philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and becarne increasingly fixed as a result

of the Industrial Revolution with its physical separation of work and home, the rise

7Janet Wolff. Ferninine Sentences: Essa* on Gender and Culture, (Berkeley: University of Caiifomia Press, 1990), chapter 2. of the middle classes, and the subsequent 'institutionalisation' of national identity.

While it would be a mistake to describe the relationship of the spheres as dualistic. it is important to undentand that the interrelationship of public and private was certainly problematic, if only on an ideological basis. The construction of woman as 'other'. although hardly a new idea. was socially institutionalised by the bourgeois values which proved increasingly dominant. Denise Riley, in her work 'Am I That

Name?: Feminism and the Cateaory of "Women" in History (1988)' claims that the nineteenth century debates about citizenship, comrnunity, and reform effectively

'refashioned' the division of the spheres in terms of feminism and the question of suffrage. Riley describes the necessary link between socialism - or more specifically

Fabianism and social responsibility - and the birth of 'modern' feminism:

If the eighteenth century had left the category of 'wornen' in need of some vast renovation, then certainly the idea of citizenship could lend itself to many broadly progressive and sanitary adaptations of 'women'. Fabian thought especially seized on citizens hip as a form of political responsibility. 'The community' became an imminently political terrain of women. a necessary funnel to socialism, and a place for education.'

Feminist movement for reform grew out of the class-based rhetoric of the Chartist movement. The first draft of the initial Chartist petition in 1838 included women in its plea to extend the franchise. Despite the faa that this was abandoned lest it endanger the cause of full manhood suffrage, 1838 marked the entry of 'women's issues' into public discourse. As Riley points out, this had huge

'~eniseRiley, -Am 1 That Name?': Feminism and the Cwory of Womenwin History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 198û), p. 55. 8 implications for the "category of women". Its meaning as a collectivity ensconced in the realm of the private came into question on many fronts. The paradox of

'essence' and 'appea rance'. and its categorical difficulty became of central importance in the debate.9 This debate was of course conduaed by men in the public arenas of parliament and the published word. and sought to define 'women' in relation to the 'public' by building on existing assumptions about female nature without atternpting to reconstrub the idea itself: "any political deployment of

'women' had no choice but to build upon, or try to undermine, this inherited foundation. "'O

It was not until the 1880s that the 'wornen's question' becarne a major source of public debate, as increasing numbers of middle-class women became actively involved in campaigns for social purity, higher education. and enfranchisement. The 'social purity' movement arose out of the dual forces of religious revivalism and opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s.

These acts "allowed compulsory examination of women suspected of working as prostitutes in garrison towns and ports... [and the] campaign for their repeal gave women the experience of thinking and speaking about previously tabooed

Riley, p. 70.

1O Riley. p. 70; See also Anna Clark, The Stru ale for the Breeches (London: Rivers Oram, 1996); Anna Clark, 'The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830s and 1840s'. Journal of British Skidia 31 (1 W2),62-88; Anna Clark, 'Gender, Class and the Nation: Franchise Refom in England, 1832-1928, in James Vernon (editor), Re-readina the Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 239-53. 9 topics."" It is significant that Victorian women entered the public via the extremely ptivate issues of venereal disease and prostitution. They began to challenge socially acceptable standards of male sexual treatment of women. rejecting prevalent notions about masculine desire and calling for the greater sexual responsibility of men in general. The early suffrage rnovement was intrinsically related to the campaigns for social purity, and was centraily informed by the question of sexual distinction as a matter of essence. The notion of 'women's interests' in itself implies an essential difference between the sexes, and was a major source of masculine concem that women, if enfranchised, would be generally inclined to vote as a class rather than as individuals. The politicisation of women's interests would. it was gready feared, result in a political hostility between the sexes that would distort the balance of the electorate. More cornplicated, however, was the nature of discoune between women. which was not limited to anti-feminist opposition."

Feminism, which still lacked a unified philosophy, had at least a common goal before 1914: the franchise. Yet the question of 'women's interests', linked as it was to notions of sexuality and difference, gave rise to an ideological conflict between women at the fin de siècle. The problem of surplus women, a great source of national concern since the results of the 1861 English census

11 Sheila Jeffreys, The Sdnster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 7. See also Judith Walkovitz. City of Dreadful Deliaht (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). l2 Çee Lucy Bland. Banishing the 6east (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1995) for instance. 10 revealed a significant demographic imbalance between men and women that continued to grow. This necessarily meant that many women were forced to earn their own living, while at the same time increasing numben of middle-class women were positively choosing to remain unmamed and independent. influenced by other forces such as 'ethical' socialism, the expansion of higher education for women and the growth of white collar (clerical) work during the 1880s and 9ûs. Yet these "Odd

Women" faced pressures other than those related to the concerns of population and national efficiency. Late Mctorian medicine and psychology began to assert the reality of

... women's capacity for sexual pleasure and discussed the psychological and biological harmfulness of celibacy. One of the significant factors in this change was the recognition of female sexual desire, both as a physical function and as a health requirernent. Physicians promoted the idea that women needed sexual intercourse just as men did, and that 'the evil results of abstinence are especially noticeable in ~ornen."~

Such 'evil results' were believed to be manifest in nervous mental and physical disorders such as hysteria, anorexia, sterility, and lesbianism, among others.

Feminist reaction to such discourse took two forms. The first group, known as thel'New Women" of modemity, took up the acknowledgment of female sexual desire. advocated free love and denied that the duties of marriage and rnotherhood were the only routes to fulfilment for a woman. yet they tended to encourage the idea that the chaste woman risked the dangers of repression. The

'3 Elaine Showalter, Semal Anafcbv aender and Culture at the Fin de SiBcle, (Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1WO), p. 21. 7 1 second believed celibacy to be a powerful tool for social reform. Christabel

PanWiurst. a leader of the social purity movement and author of The Great Scourae and How to End it, saw abstinence as a '"silent strike' against oppressive relations with men."" Other activists, such as Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Frances

Swiney, separated themseives from the Christian mores of social purity and advocated the woman's primary right of bodily integrity "free from al1 uninvited touch of man. "15 and denied the centrality of physical gratification as necessary to fulfilment, claiming that continence was a means of greater spiritual and therefore social well-being. While these discourses provided women with new means for asserting their equality and contesting the reality of the separate spheres, they were fundamentally grounded in an understanding of the woman as an essentially sexual being, a paradox which continued to be problematic for feminism. Yet amid the contradictory nature of feminist discussions of sexuality, the suffrage campaign was nonetheless a unified attempt not only for enfranchisement, but also to "redefine and recreate, by political means, the sexual culture of Britain. "M

The campaign for women's suffrage mobilised out of the diffusion of its purpose brought about by the competing sexual discourses of the fin de siècle into a militant phase which began in 1905 and continued until the outbreak of the

14 Showaiter, p. 22. 15 Jeffreys, p. 33. l6 Susan Kingsley Kent. Sex and Suffrgge in Britain 4860 - 1914, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, l987), p. 3- 12

First World War. Its militancy took the form of such things as nonviolent marches and obstruction of political meetings, until 1909, when suffragists' protests became manifest in such violent demonstrations as stone-throwing, window smashing, and hunger strikes. The August 1914 declaration of war had the immediate effect of dampening the suffrage movement. In the face of a national emergency many feminists, most notably Christabel Pankhunt, exchanged the cause of suffrage for patriotism, and indeed ferninist activism lost its impetus in the wake of the 'larger' issues at stake. Yet the role of women in the war effort, and particularly in the workplace, served to accelerate in a practical way the concepts of change and emancipation that had been ideologically present in the Suffrage movement.

With women filling the jobs left vacant by the men in uniform and those created for the increased demands of the war, they proved themselves capable of holding an active place in society. Although their work was in many ways restricted, the very faa that so many wornen were earning their own money for the first time endowed a real sense of freedom and confidence not felt before. While the war provided women with more opportunities for public engagement than had previously been open to them, it nonetheless demarcated the line between the separate spheres of male and female, public and pnvate, that pre-war feminists had attempted to obliterate. As heroes of the home front and keepen of the faith they achieved what years of activism had failed to do, and were granted a limited franchise (i-e: to women over thirty who were householders or the wives of 13

householders) in the Representation of the People Act, passed early in 1918. The

immediate post-war reaction to the huge numben of women in the work force was,

however, hostile. Outcry over retuming soldien unable to find work, concern about the low birth rate (largely due to the increasingly widespread use of contraceptives), and heightened awareness of 'superfluous' women (made more apparent by the numbers of men killed in the war), combined to create enormous public pressure upon wornen to place their materna1 duties above al1 else. At the same time, matemal and infant mortality rates rose sharply, and the general state of women's health was revealed to be shockingly bad. Organised feminism in the 1920s and 30s never regained its prewar size or status; Susan Kingsley Kent has pointed out how feminism found itself continually "on the defensive after 1918. "" The movement became divided anew between 'Old' and 'New' ferninism, which continued to play into the debate about separate spheres, and the clash of ideological (equal rights, reform of the divorce laws) and practical (health-care. birth control) issues which dominated the feminist agenda.

In this atmosphere of struggle for definition and recognition, British women faced the difficult problem of expressing their gendered identity without compromising their egalitarianism. If the war demarcated the perceived lines between public and private, these lines began to blur in postwar society, a paradox

" Susan Kingsley Kent. Sex and Suffraae in Britain 1860 - 1914. p. 222. See also Susan Kingsley Kent, Makina Peace: the Reconstruction of Gender in lnterwar Britain: (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1993). 14 which infomed British women writers, consciously feminist or not. In the upheaval of postwar society, and the modernist insistence on the conneaion between art and experience, female writing sought to assert the validity of their experience in and of the war. As Janet Wolff has argued, the tendency to separate questions of modemity from questions of modernism - how art relates to experience - has limited cultural analysis as it relates to gender issues." British women writers sought to inscribe their participation in and stniggle to change interwar society; textually, they faced a choice between attempting the formal innovations of modernism, or a more traditionally representative articulation of their experience of modernity. In either case their 'authority' to do so was cornpromised. Before further examining the problematic relationship between writing, authority and gender, is necessary to discuss briefly how the Great War has been seen in the context of modernist development, and the manner of its cultural and literary impact upon British society.

II

Samuel Hynes describes the Edwardian dichotorny of conflict and security as "the wan before the war".19 Pointing out that in 1912 "there was a prolonged miner's strike, Suffragists began their campaign of destroying property by breaking shopwindows, and the government once more tried and failed to get

'* Wolff. Feminine Sentences, chapter 1. 19 Samuel Hynes, A War Imaained: the First World War and Enalish Culture, (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1975). This is the ütie of chapter 1, p. 5. 15 a Home Rule bill for Ireland through ~arliament,"~Hynes discusses how social and political unrest in pre-war England was mirrored by a similar aggressiveness in the art world. The English avant-garde, rejeding Post-lmpressionism and naturalism with such experiments as Neo-Realism, began to play with the Continental influences of Cubism and Futurism, both of which relished the possibility of severance from the past by glorifying the machine age.

Vorticism, a uniquely English development, grew out of the Cubist work of Wyndham Lewis, C. R. W. Nevinson, and several othen. Lewis, who with the painter Kate Lechmere had founded the Rebel Art Center in early 1914, coined the terrn 'Vorticism' after the publication of Nevinson's article Vital English Art. Futurist

Manifestof in The Observer in June 1914, alienating "the English Cubists from

Futurism."" A less romantic endorsement of the urban landscape than that of

Futurism, the Vorticist style "is exact' concrete and anti-humanist."* The

'revolutionary' publication Blast, written by Lewis and Ezra Pound, which first appeared the same month, was a belligerent attack upon "English traditions, and the English past; and (perhaps most significantly) it defined itself in generational terms, and opposed itself specifically to the previous generati~n."~~Radically anti-establishment and elitist, Blast perceived the artist as a soldier fighting to

2 1 Franms Spalding, -Art Since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 48.

22 SpaJding, p. 52. 23 Hynes, p.8. 16 destroy what was seen as the smug cornplacence of Vicîorianisrn, "the bourgeoisie, the philistines and the ordinary man in the street, above al1 invoking rage against

rnedio~rity".~' Yet its vitality as a rnovement barely survived 1915, perhaps surprising for a sensibility that thrived on strife and aggression. lnitially brilliantly able to manipulate its forms to portray the hanh meaninglessness of modern warfare, Nevinson wrote tenely of his earliest war paintings: 'My obvious belief was that war was now dominated by machines and that men were mere cogs in the rnechani~m'.'~The anonymous nature of such technique could not. however, long survive the apparent need of most artists who experienced the war to 'record' its landscapes, and Nevinson, Lewis, David Bomberg and William Roberts began to replace their earlier. splintered, images of 'brittle d~namism'~~with representations of the solid and the tangible.

The cultural implications of the war rooted in the experiences of combatant men has been a subject of academic discourse over the past twenty-five yean. Tmditional constructions of language had. it appeared, become insufficient to contain or describe the experience of twentieth century warfare, yet the process of 'reconstruction' proved ambivalent. Vorticism had attempted to divorce the past from the new modem order; such radicalisrn proved impossible in a postwar world which bore the deep scars of the past. The language in which the

24 Spalding, British Ait Since 1900, p. 53. *' Spalding. British Art Since 190. p. 56. " Spaîding, British Art Since 190Q, p. 57. 17

war has been described was therefore uniquely informed by rnemory and the need

for remembrance as much as by direct experience of its horron. This led to a

mythologising of significant events and experiences, indeed of the impact of the

Great War as a whole. At the heart of this ambiguity also lies the relationship

between the war and the practice of modernism. If modernism is to be seen

essentially as an artistic response to the experience of modernity itself, then its

literaiy developments after 1918 - while exhibiting many of the characteristics of its

prewar manifestation - cannot be separated from the war.

Modernism, which arose out of the newly-metropolitan nineteenth century and its philosophical tension between scientific (empirical) positivism and the nihilism of Nietzschean intuition, relies on the subjea to assert avthority of meaning in an increasingly decentered culture. Modernist literature rejected the realist traditions of the nineteenth century, abandoning the conventional relationship between author and reader and employing new styles such as stream-of-consciousness, and the use of fragmentary collage and complicated allusions to replace straightforward exposition of ideas. T. S. Eliot describes the new philosophy of poetry, with its rejection of Romanticist and bourgeois values, in his essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. He argues that literary heritage, or tradition, cannot be inherited, but is the produa of 'great labour' ."Tradition is not

27 T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individuai Talent". in The Sacred Woa ( London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1920), p. 49. See also Victor Li, 'Policing the City Modernisrn, Autonomy and Authority, Criticism 34 (1992), pp. 26 1 -81 18 the handing down of 'the best that has been thought or said', as Matthew Arnold believed; rather it is the 'historical sense', or consciousness of the whole weight of the western literary tradition and of one's aesthetic relationship to al1 artists within and without the temporal. He dismisses the exalted notion of the artist as inspired, rather

the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continuai extinction of penonality... lt is in this depersonalisation that art may be said to approach the condition of science ...For it is not the 'greatness'. the intensity, of the emotions, the cornponents, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure. so to speak. under which the fusion takes place .28

Such an emotionless 'extinction of personality' is discussed by Sandra Gilbert and

Susan Gubar as the construction of "an implicitly masculine aesthetic of hard, abstract verse that is opposed to the aesthetic of soft, effusive, personal verse supposedly written by women and Romantics" ."

Gilbert and Gubar, discussing the widespread dismissal of most - and the grudging acceptance of a few - female writers of the early twentieth century by their male counterparts, criticise the subsequent construction of the modernist canon based upon a rnasculinist reading of Eliot's theory. The 'publicisation' of the female imagination. reflected in the tremendous growth of women's literary success

28 Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent". pp. 53 & 55.

29 Çandra Gilbeit and Susan Gubar, 'Tradition and the Fernale Talent: Modemism and Masculinism", in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 154. at this period, resulted in a masculine readion against literary women which, they argue, became in itself "a motive for modernism. "m the locus of elite knowledge of western literary tradition being found at the university and in the men's clubs where, for the most part, it remained. Gilbert and Gubar's theory of a distinctly fernale modemism, drawing on its explicitly female traditions. poses a challenge to the apparent polernic of masculine and ferninine modernism:

Eliot's theory that new works of art alter not only our sense of the past but also our sense of what art might be actually seems to reflect the sexual crisis that underlies modernism. For inevitably, the "ideal order" of patriarchal literary story was radically "modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art" - and, as Woolf remarked, that "really new work" was women's work?

The work of the cultural historians Paul Fussell. Samuel Hynes and

Modris Eksteins has demonstrated the value of using nontraditional historical sources in the attempt to capture more accurately the 'imaginative' truth, or mentalité. of the past. All three have produced major studies - The Great War and

Modem Memow (1975), A War Imaoined: The First World War and Enolish Culture

(1 WI), and Rites of Sprina: The Great War and the Birth of the Modem Aae (1989)' respeciively - which describe the radical impact of the experience of the Great War upon the modern consciousness. They have investigated the greater cultural implications - both before and after the war - of the tensions inherent in the

30 Gilbert and Gubar, Tradition and the Female Talent: Modemism and Masculinisrnn,p. 156.

31 Gilbert and Gubar, Tradition and the Female Talent: Modernism and Masculinismn,p. 162. 20 . language of war and remembrance, and few would deny the enormous impact that certain images of the First World War, such as that prolonged exercise in futility, the

Batde of the Somme, together with the loss of a generation of young men, has had on our twentieth century imagination. Fussell and Hynes have, in this, traced an ironic cultural development in Britain, while Eksteins' work is concerned with Europe in general.

These three books together consütute, to date, the bulk of academic work in English which has been manifestly concerned with the cultural history of the war. The recent publication of a fourth work, Jay Wintefs provocative Sites of

Memorv. Sites of Mourning (1993), arguing that traditional aesthetic forms penisted until 1945, is an addition to this list, but is too seledive in its treatment of the 'culture of bereavement' which arose in France, Gerrnany and England after the

Great War to be of use in the purpose at hand. It is, however, necessary to summarise briefly the major arguments of Fussell, Hynes, and Eksteins.

The Great War and Modem Memory examines the rich literary legacy of the war by investigating "the simultaneous and reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature while literature returns the favour by conferring forms upon life."32Paul Fussell moniton the dynamic between experience and literature by explon'ng in detail those aspects of the war which have been memorialised as its 21 central events, passing thereby into twentieth century memory. He locates the western front and its trenches as the site which more than any other has ernbodied the tension between the experience of profound crisis and the parameters of linguistic fomi to desuibe such crisis. Fussell vividly evokes the landscape of trench warfare by stressing not only the familiar litany of niined architecture, mud, lice, and rats. but by desctibing the symbolic potential of poetic forms such as the horizon, dusk and dawn. Pointing out that "morning and evening stand-to's were the occasions when the sky especially offered itself for observation and interpretation,"" he demonstrates the metamorphosis of poetry's favourite themes of sunrise and sunset, from Ruskinesque splendour to Georgian poignancy to Eliot's .

'brown fog of a winter dawn'." Dawn and dusk provide ironic juxtaposition between

Nature's harrnony and Man's destruction; they hold the tense anticipation of coming battle. Most keenly, they are the moments of respite, belonging to the dead who had "Iived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow":" the times when the dead and dying might be brought back to their own lines for burial, when reflection and memory may be indulged.

Fussell is predorninantly concemed with the human need for meaning and its relationship to the dynamic between art, life, and memory. We are literaiy

"T. S. Eliot, me Waste Land, in Colleded Poems 1909-1962 , (London: Faber and Faber ,1963). p. 65.

3~John McCrae. In Flandets Felds, in Jon Sflkin (ed), The Penauin Book of First World War Poety, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). 22 by nature; poetry and metaphor express the construction and deconstruction of order. The cataclysm of the Fint World War, Fussell argues, stretched the limits of linguistic form: its literature is therefore the tuming point in the construction of modemity. Yet his account is far from subtie; he is unable to dissociate himself from the narrative pattern of "innocence savaged and de~tro~ed"~~which in itself is the most endunng 'rnyth' of the war. He does not adequately place the war in its historical context, rather The Great War and Modem Merno-, as a piece of literary criticisrn, participates in the ritualised expression of the language of the Lost

Generation instead of simply descnbing it.

A War Imaained, written sixteen yean later, concurs with Fussell's prinaple "batart and history are not to be separated", but is a more rigorous and

Mder examination of the significance of myth-making. While much of the territory is familiar to readen of Fussell, Hynes' approach critically analyses the impact of the war on the cultural imagination; his primary subject is the "sense of radical changeMu in English culture which premiled imrnediately before, du ring and after the war. He is concemed with what he calls the 'Myth of the Waf, not to be thought of as false, but rather as an imaginative interpretation of the war, evolving over the yean of conflict and becoming definitive as the immediate postwar generation began writing about its significance. It "is a tale that confirms a set of attitudes, an idea of what the war was and what it meant.""

The Myth of the War can perhaps be described as a 'meta-narrative' in that it became colleaively assimilated by conternporary writers both creative and critical, and thus passed into the cultural imagination. It can be briefly surnmarised thus:

... a generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory, and England. went off to war to make the world safe for dernocracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and ernbittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in so doing separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance."

Within the meta-narrative lies a whole construction of narratives, or myths, which have been recorded in alrnost every account of the Fint Worid War produced since

1918: the myth of the Lost Generation, the Old Men, the Damaged Men, and so on.

The significance of the myth is that it is representative of the wafs interruption and transmutation of the development of modemity. Just as Vorticism could not suwive the initial stages of the war, so the significant writer/soldiers who survived, such as

Robert Graves. Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and others were unable to participate in the formal development of language after the war. Theirs was the fint reaction of shattered innocence, but they could not define the altered sense of

38 Hynes, p. xi. 39 Hynes, p. MT- 24 history which ernerged from the war. They could not have described the postwar world as 'a heap of broken irnages~;~only those men who had not fought possessed the luxury of naming the chaos. Hynes discusses the tension in postwar laquage at length, particularly in regard to the complicated play of monuments and 'anti-monuments' in articulating a rhetoric of remembrance. His conclusion anses, significantly. from Virginia Woolf s question 'what was Merent ?" which s he asks in A Room of One's Own (1 929). The answer is that romance has been killed, the romance "of a time that seemed to hold more pr~mise."~'Nostalgia, loss and disillusionment, whether truth or illusion, is the predominant legacy of the "new and terrible realities of hi~toqt"'~wrought by the war.

Modris Eksteins'

Modem Aae confronts the same questions as The Great War and Modern Mernory and A War lrnaained from a very different angle. A historian of modem Germany,

Eksteins considers the war, modernity, and modernism from both sides of the trenches. He is, quite literally, concerned with the choreography of 'the crowded dance of modern life', taking his primary images throughout the work from dance.

The book opens with the première performance of Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russe production of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring in Paris in 191 3, and concludes with Hitler's suicide in the bunker as, simultaneou~ly~a wild dance broke out in his officers'

" Eliot, me Waste Land. p. 63. 41 Hynes, p. 468. 42 Hynes, p. 469. 25 nearby canteen. Rebellious energy, sacrificial death and the celebration of life in the rnidst of destniciion characterise Eksteins' definition of modernisrn as represented by movement. In the preface he juxtaposes an automobile dump near Verdun with a graveyard of the First World War, claiming that

...this book will try to show that the two graveyards are related. For our preoccupation with speed, newness, transience, and inwardness - with life lived..." in the fast lane" - to have taken hold, an entire scale of values and beliefs had to yield pride of place, and the Great War was ... the single most significant event in that de~eloprnent.~

Eksteins. like Fussell and Hynes, draws upon the mimetic . interrelationship of art and life. He describes, for example, Germany's initial association of the war with spiritual liberation and the advancement of kultur , in ternis of the Schlieffen plan as a Wagnerian fan ta^^,^ and discusses the imaginative significance of the 'dance' of football as a rnetaphor for Britain's self-appointed role as guardian of civilisation and fair play. Eksteins chronicles the process of the loss of 'innocence' in cultural and historical ternis as experienced by al1 of Europe. An entire chapter is dedicated to the famous 'truce' that spontaneously arose on most parts of the western front over Christmas 1914. He argues that it was the Christmas tnice, rather than the guns of August, which brought the final curtain down on the stage of the Edwardian afternoon; the men who sang to each other across

43 Eksteins. p- xiv. Eksteins. p. 89. 26 no-man's-land, exchanged jokes and goods, and possibly played a football match together possessed "a set of social values and a psychological disp~sition"~~which could not sunive the course of the war. The Battle of the Somme, that grim parody of thwarted rnovernent, destroyed the sensibility of that Christmas, together with the perceptions of duty and heroism which carried the first waves of men to war.

Transcendent reason, aesthetic forms and moral standards alike were assaulted in the seemingly endless barrage of machine gun fire and gas attacks. Language, too, becarne as unstable "as the mud on the S~rnrne":~~the euphemisms - or, to use

Hynes' expression, the 'big words' still in use on the home front and in many solder's letten had, by 191 7, become grossly inadequate for most intellectuals at . war.

Describing Britain between the wars, Eksteins quotes Stephen

Spender recalling that "The war had knocked the ball-room Roor from under middle-class English life, ...people resembled dancers suspended in mid-air yet miraculously able to pretend they were still dancing".47 The spiritual restlessness of the postwar world is, for Eksteins. embodied in the 1920s and 30s by a "romantic agony"." The danse macabre has become a part of the irony of modem life, symbolising "our centrifuga1 and paradoxical century, when in striving for freedom

"Eksteins. p. 109. "Eksteins, p. 21 8. 47 Eksteins, p. 256. " Eksteins. p. 284. we have acquired the power of ultimate destruction" ?9

Ill

The works of Fussell, Hynes. and Eksteins are fairly cornprehensive analyses of the nature of language and 'modern memory' as a result of the Great

War. Yet there is scant acknowledgment and remarkably little attempt to trace the participation of women in the construction of this rnemory; the landscapes of

Fussell, Hynes and Ekçteins are almost without exception masculine. 1s it therefore the case that women were unable to participate significantly in the postwar development of a modernist style, directly informed as that style is by the experience of war? Two recent studies, Sharon Ouditt's Fiahtina Forces. Writing

Women (1994), and Claire Tyiee's The Great War And Wornen's Consciousness

(1990), discuss "how British women imagined the Great War and their relation to itMMby exarnining the nature of women's participation in the war, and how they wrote about it.

Ouditt's chief concern is to describe women's response to the potential significance of the war for feminism:

...women were defined by the ideology of the day as war's 'other'. This they could manipulate, as the VADs did; resist, as some land and munitions workers did; passively accept, as did some women who rninded the home

"claire ~yiee.e -1 i Womanhood in Worneri's Writina, 1914-1 964, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 251 - front; or transfomi into an anti-patriarchal power-base. as did the feminist pacifists - including Virginia ~oolf.~'

Tylee writes in almost direct response to Fussell, and atiempts to trace the nature of women's contribution to the myths he describes in The Great War and Modern

Memory, and how they have articulated their position as outsiders:

Women's writing has transrnitted myths about ... the zone to which t h e y gained access, and the zone frorn which they were exduded. How did the modes of imagining available to women enable thern to undentand their own experience of the War in relation to what men experienced? What is the nature of the myths that my generation of women inhe~-ited?~*

She is concemed with articulating dHerence by stressing the simiiar treatment both women and men applied to the war when they wrote about it. Tylee demonstrates that there are uniquely female patterns to be discerned among women's rnyths of the Great War, such as the theme of death and resurrection evident in their elegies, exemplified by such works as Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. Enid Bagnold's

The Happy Foreicyer, and the novel Bid Me to Live: a Madri al, by the American modernist poet H. D.=

Taking up Paul Fussell's thesis that "the dominant form of modem understanding is ironie"," Tylee contrasts Robert Graves' treatment of history as

5 1 Sharon Ouditt, Fiahtina Forces. Writina Women: ldentitv and ldeoloav- - in the Fitçt World War, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 21 7.

Tyiee, pp. 2330-1. 54 Tyiee, p. 243, 29 satire, and Edmund Blunden's conscious use of the pastoral literary style - both of which become a techne for irony - with the ferninine preoccupation with reasserting "sacred values in a profane world"." She cites the work of Mary Borden,

Katherine Mansfield and H. D. as examples of the manner in which women approached the sense of cultural dislocation effected by the war, contending that women were able to be ironic "about both war and the idea of the soldief"' and still impose order upon the shattered landscape.

In this lies a paradigm needing further examination. Women were the exiles of war, unable to participate. even imaginatively, in the act of murder which is central to its experience. As such the landscape which women paint is not composed of the heap of broken images which was the inheritance of the men of the war and postwar generations. For them the fissuring of the old order meant less preoccupation with describing its wins than with participation in the new order, whose meaning may have changed but is not utterly lost. If they were exiles of war, they were citizens of the postwar world. In her study Forever Enaland: Femininity,

Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (1991), Alison Light has suggested that twentieth century masculine literature has been charaaerised by a prevailing mood of exile;n I would suggest that its ferninine counterpart is a prevailing mood

"Aison Light. Forever Fnaland:- Femininitv. Literature and Co nservatism 8etween the Wars (London: Routiedge, 1991 ). of engagement.

There is a wealth of interwar literature which directly addresses the nature of modem rnasnilinity in ternis of ironic detachment from the old order. The postwar themes of lost manhood. fallen innocence, and emasculation so prevalent in male-centred texts are testament to this sense of masculinity as being "in a state of shock or simply blown away"." At the same time women were publishing an unprecedented volume of fiction, both in the popular mode and experirnenting with the more sophisticated forrns of modernist literature. while addressing contemporary concerns regarding feminism, sexuality. socialism and the threat of . fascism, class, unemployment etc. (a few examples of these writers are Rosamond

Lehmann, Stevie Smith, Helen Zenna Smith, F. Tennyson Jesse, Vera Brittain,

Winifred Holtby, Radclyffe Hall, Antonia White, Dorothy Richardson. and Virginia

Woolf). They approached with gusto the problem of defining a female voice. refusing to be allocated to their traditional literary realm of the romantic. or to the genteel nobility of feminine 'higher things'. I am, therefore, concerned with articulating British women's relationship to literature and culture in the 1920s and

30s. taking as rny fint principle this mood of engagement and what it cornes to mean, as a reflection of women's ambivalent position in a society in flux.

In 1930 Winifred Holtby reviewed a 'woman's war book' for the

" Ught p. 210. 31 feminist weeWy Tirne And Ede, in which she described women's relationship to the postwar order as the 'gospel of detachment'. She believed that women's experience of exile from the abof war had provided them with a new opportunity for insight into the shifting forces of social change evident during and after the war. Yet the charge of political engagement in such changes weighed heavily upon most of the women who took up the challenge: they wrote with an earnestness and passionate intensrty which often belies their effectiveness. Each of the women I am specifically concerned with - Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, and Stevie Smith

- made use in different ways of their detachment from the experience of war to articulate their criticism of culture and society. Al1 four women came from conservative middle-class backgrounds, and al1 had the privilege of higher education. Unlike the othen, Stevie Smith did not go to univenity, although she had been carefully schooled in the expectation that she would, and her writing reflects an intimate knowledge of Classical western literature. These women shared the milieu of journalistic and literary London between the wan. Holtby, Brittain, and

Ja meson, three of the best known writers-cum-politica l activists of their day, rejected the modernist technique in favour of representational narratives through which to expound their polemic. Stevie Smith, unconstrained by the 'earnestness' of political cornmitment, experimented with modernism and alleviated the weight of conternporary political reference which burdened the othen, yet they were al1 informed by a need to unite the persona1 and political in a manner that was manifestly of their time. The structure of this thesis develops some of the arguments made by

Maroula Joannou in her 1995 study Ladies. Please Don't Smash These Windows:

Women's Writino. Ferninist Consciousness and Social Chanae 191839." Joannou examines several individual literaty works by British women in the yean following the franchise, seeking to discern "patterns of resistance in women writers who attempted to find new idiorns and strategies for expressing women's experience." and more specifically. address the ongoing problem of how to express difference

"without being oppressive or politically counter-productive to women" .'' Joannou's

assessrnent of woman-centered texts of the intewar period is limited by her . too-critical bias of late twentieth century feminism. but she does succeed in her analysis of literature textually - and contextually - in direct relation to its historical situation, without losing sight of the imaginative independence of fiction. She picks up an important thread of cnticisrn surrounding female writers after the war, whose authority was challenged by their perceived lack of credibility as non-cornbatants, which extended into the difficulties they faced in interwar society; yet the women of the 1920s and 30s were arnong "the rnost enthusiastic creators, transrnitten and publicists of the vibrant and deeply politicised literature of their time."" I intend

59 See Maroula Joannou. 'bdies. Please Don't Smash These Windows*:Women's Writing. Feminist Consciousness and Soàal Chan= (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995).

" Joannou, p. 5. 62 Joannou, p. 193. 33 to explore some of the ways in which these women dealt with the aftemath of the

First World War in their persona1 and political lives. pinpointing how the 'gospel of detachment' provided thern with a distinct mode in which to address the social and political imperatives with which they were concemed.

This thesis will discuss three major themes of intewar British culture: the remembrance of war, the problem of feminism after the franchise, and the political Iiterature of the 1930s. All three involve the complications of gender politics in the aftemath of the Great War. Chapter two examines the process of memorialising the war from a female perspective, as evident in Vera Brittain's .

Testament of Youth and Storm Jameson's No Time Like the Present; chapter three is concemed with the feminist divide of the 1920s between 'old' and 'new' theories

(based on issues of gendered difference and/or equality) as it played out in the feminist weekly Time And Tide, and how, in the journalism and fiction of Winifred

Holtby, the war becomes a mechanism for political engagement; finally, chapter four looks at the politicised literature of the 1930s. long held as masculine terrain, though the female eyes of Storm Jameson and Stevie Smith, and discloses the effectiveness of modernism as a tool for imagining gender discourses in the arena of war. I have relied almost exclusively upon fiction and memoir for primary sources. taking care to balance these with more traditional historical texts. Thme

And Tide was used in chapter three as an exception because of its uniqueness as a ferninist political weekly staffed largely by Miten of fidon. It proved an invaluable 34 tool for examining the problems of interwar feminism in the context of politics and fiction.

The 'gospel of detachment' is evident outside the realm of the Mers and texts discussed here. Space does not permit a more general study of this question, but these four women of similar age, historieal, social and cultural experience, are largely representative of the attitude of the politically aware female writer of this period. They attempted to make use of their exile from the experience of combat in order to engage their feminine identities as a locus of political struggle. The penonal is not only political, it is crucial to a broader understanding of the interplay of gender concerns in relation to the anxieties of a society atternpting to come to terrns with the aftermath of one war even as it was drawn inexorably towards the next. -2- Testaments of a Generation? The Problem of Authonty in Women's Accounts of the War: Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson

If, as I have proposed, British women's literature of the early twentieth century is characterised by a prevailing mood of engagement (as opposed to the predominance of irony in masculine literature) which is directly related to the response of fernale writers to their experience of the war, then it is necessary to examine how they approached the problern of writing subjective accounts of the war itself, as members of the war generation and as noncombatants. This chapter

will begin to illustrate this by attempting to consider the question of authority, as ' exemplified in the war mernoirs of Vera Brittain (1896 - 1970) and Storm Jameson

(1891- 1986) both published in 1933: Testament of Youth and No Time Like the

Present, respectively.

In Febniary and March of 1930 a series of letten to the editor appeared in the weekly feminist paper Time and Tide which debated the reasons why "the attitude towards war-books amongst men seem[ed] ... to be entirely different frorn the attitude towards them amongst ~ornen".~~A reader, 'A. D', wrote in response to the comment by St John Ervine in the previous week's issue that the only negative reviews he had seen of Frederick Manning's Her Privates We were written

Tlme and Xde, Febniary 7,1930. p. 178. 35 36 . by women. She rejected Ervine's suggestion that this was due to any inherent distinction between the sexes; rather it was "merely the difference between the attitude of the penon who has, or might have, been there and the person who has not". It was normal that men should possess a seemingly tireless enthusiasm for each new publication which could recreate "the most intense emotional period of their lives", while most women - henelf included- could not be but bored by those books composed of "detailed descriptions of life in the trenches [which descibe. in effect, stories] ... about some foreign countryM." The following week a long letter appeared by Vera Brittain (then on the paper's editorial board), in which, despite her sympathy with A. D's attitude, she clairned that the problem was rather "that . in men's war-books - and nearly al1 the war-books so far have been written by men

- the part played by women in the war is either under emphasised or ignored", 66 while they were depicted only as parasites, prostitutes, or weeping wives and mothers. She went on to larnent the prevailing impression "that one sex only played an active part in the war, and one sex only experienced its deepest emotions,""and suggested that women would continue to be 'bored' by war books until their interest was properiy piqued by a major publication which acknowledged wornen's central role in the war, publicly as active participants and privately as mourners.

TNRe and Tide, February 7, 1930, p. 178. " Time and Tide, February 7, 1930. p. 178.

Bg Vera Brittain, in Women and War Books: Letters to the Editof, Time and TideJ-ebbnify 21. 1930, p. 242.

BT Tlme and Tide, February 21 , 1930, p.243. 37

Btittain must have been shocked by the biting sarcasm she in tum provoked. The next two issues contained letten from women obviously angered by

'Miss. Brittain's' sweeping condescension and in particular her presumption that, as a V.A.D, she had the authority to speak of the war as though she had truly experienced it. One letter was particularly venomous:

I personally, as soon as I was old enough, went into the Land Amy (and, incidentally, was on of those despicable women who wept "forlorn, unavailing tean" over their nearest relatives); but I never felt somehow, that I was doing anything half as important as my male relations, who by this tirne were dead. It is therefore a great comfort to me to know that "the part played by women is either under-emphasised or altogether ignored", and that credit may yet be given where credit is due. Miss Brittain, with whom I feel almost a personal familiarity through her prolific literary output and her photographs in the Dailies, has already guided my faltering steps about Marriage, Morals, and Maternity. May I hope that she is to be the Great Deliverer who will put to an end, once and for all, to this nonsense about Men having fought and won the warp

Another simply stated that "any woman, wherever or however she did her war work, who imagines that she stood anywhere but on the remote fringes of the War itself simply proclaims herself one of that 'srnug-faced crowd with kindling eye' for whom

Siegfried Sassoon wrote the more scaring of his war poems."69 Brittain in her own defense of her "harmless and entirely speculative little letter on women and war books"70 reinforced her argument that the continued representation of women as passive sufferen was false and sentimental. and denied that she had "in any way disparaged the men who fought in the trenches by my suggestion that the women

88 77me and Tide, February 28.1930. p. 272. rime and Tide, March 7.1930, p. 31 1. Time and Tid8, March 7,1930. p. 310. 38 who thus preferred active work to inanimate grief have so far been adequately repre~ented."~'Yet Brittain was at the time already engaged with working on the book which would indeed redress the balance and 'deliver' women to their acknowledged status as full-fledged mernben of the Lost Generation. Testament of Youth is the best known work about the Fint World War written by a wornen. In many ways it is also the most ambiguous. This series of correspondence, which took place three yean before its publication, exemplifies the problem of authority which women who wrote about the Great War faced in a variety of ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, and raises a number of related issues.

In the chapter of A War lmaoined entitled 'The War Becomes Myth',

Samuel Hynes discusses the "curious imaginative silence" "regarding direct artistic representations of the war which predominated for nearly a decade after the

Armistice. By 191 9, the flood of poetry and painting by soldier-artists had ceased. and while British art and literature between the end of the war and the General

Strike was certainly informed by the lingering spectre of the war, the great war novels and memoirs had yet to be published. Before the war could be effectively considered in hindsight, and before the more abstract representations of poetry and paint could be concretely manifested in prose. a psychological and spiritual distance had to elapse. In 1926 the first wave of 'important' books about the war

" Tlme and Tide, March 7, 1930. p. 31 1. " Hynes. p. 423. 39 was published - i.e. Ford Madox Ford's A Man Could Stand Up. T. E. Lawrence's The

Seven Pillan of Wisdom, and Herbert Read's In Retreat3- and were succeeded in the following years by the central prose texts which inform our inherited memory of the Great War. by Siegfried Sassoon and

by Edmund Blunden appeared in 1928, while Robert Graves'

Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front were both published in 1929. Ail these have remained more or less continually in print since they were first published. War novels and memoirs by women began to be published immediately after the war. though little attention was paid to them as a genre. Of the better known works by women, such as F. Tennyson Jesse's The

Sword of Deborah (1919); Enid Bagnold's T-gner (1920); Rose

Macauley's Told by an Idiot (1923); Winifred Holtby's The Crowded Street (1 924);

Jacob's Room (1 924) and Mrs. Dalloway (1 925) by Virginia Woolf; Mary Lee's Its a

Great War!(1929); Not So Quiet (1930). by Helen Zenna Smith (Evadne Price), Storm

Jarneson's No Time Like the Present (1933) and her trilogy The Mirror in Darkness

(1934-36). and Brittain's Testament of Youth (1933)' only Virginia Woolf and Vera

Brittain are still in pri it, despite a few short-lived revivals by the Virago pressT4

Samue Hynes, like Bernard Bergonzi in the earlier study Heroes'

" Hynes. p. 424. 74 Virago repnnted The Hagpv Forera= in 1987, Not So Quiet in 1988. and The Minor in Darkness in 1984; ail of these have gone out of print again. 40 . Twiliaht A Study of the Merature of the ~reat~ar, "divides war narratives into two basic forms. Bergonzi distinguishes between "those which were avowedly subjective in their approach.... offering the authof s own reflections and showing the war as it affected his own development; and those which concentrated on objective narrative, suppressing the author's direct feelings and allowing emotion to be expressed only by implication in the descriptive process" ." Hynes concurs, calling the distinctions more simply "the Autobiographical and the Historical. or the

Penonal and the General, or the Small Picture and the ~arge."~'Hynes direaly connects war narratives with the broader modemist tradition by the sense of history which marks both subjective and objective accounts of the war, that is. by the author's particular need to contextualise experience within a distinct cultural framework. The two texts at hand fall into the first category. I have not chosen representations of the latter for two particular reasons: first, I am more interested in the objective implications and cultural significance of subjective narrative than in attempts to create definitive pictures of the war; second, there is virtually nothing written by wornen in the consciously objective mode which could be strictly termed 'literary'. Unlike some masculine texts in this category. such as Herbert

Read's In Retreat. which measures autobiographical detail with authoritative commentary, women's histories do not attempt so sophisticated a balance (or

75 Bernard Bergonzi, HeroesBTwiliaht- A Studv of the Literature of the Great War (London: Constable, 1965).

77 Hynes, p. 425. 41 pehaps their biases are less apparent). Texts such as Sylvia Pankhurst's The Home

Front (1932) or Carolyn E. Playne's Society at War 1914-1 6 (1930), strive to be legitimate pieces of histotical writing and are conscientiously - and as a result al1 too conspicuously - free from authorial comment.

The question of authority lies at the heart of the problem of women's writing about the war. Claire Tylee is of the opinion that men and women shared

the cultural myths and behavioural inhibitions of their society. They suffered equally from the repression of their mernories of traumatic experiences, and from a cornmon vulnerability to the myths of irnperiali~m.'~

Yet their emotional response to the war was necessarily different from that of the men who fought. Women who volunteered as nurses or auxiliaries behind the lines t-isked their lives, witnessed death, and endured the trauma of bombardrnent, but not on the prolonged or immediate scale of the men in the trenches who killed other men and watched their cornrades mutilated or blown to pieces in front of them. The women at home suffered the agony of inadivity; their grief was necessarily passive. Later, when the war came to be memorialised in fiction and autobiography, they were acutely conscious of the ambiguity of their claim on it.

How then, cmthe experience of a generation be summarily recorded?

Storm Jarneson referred to henelf as a survivor of the Great War, and considered

78 Claire Tyiee, p. 187. 42 henelf a member of the war generation perse, yet she clearly believed that women had no particular right to speakfor her generation. She had experienced no direct role in the war itself, being a young wife and mother whose husband was not posted oveneas. However, for the thousands of wornen, predominantly single, who had indeed taken active roles in the war effort, the war had a more immediate meaning.

Yean after the war, Jameson, hearing Therets a long long trail on the wireless. could not listen, "not because the tune is cheap and nauseous but because I will not have my heart torn out by thoughts I can neither mitigate nor use."7' Such sentiments were, however. clearly not shared by women like Enid Bagnold, Helen Zenna Smith, and Vera Brittain, for whom the war had to be imagined, used and mitigated precisely by being written about. And yet, in attempting to speak for her generation, in chronicling the waste of war, Vera Brittain perpetuates the gulf between male and female experience.

The ambivalent authoriv of feminine renderings of the war in prose is effectively demonstrated by Storm Jarneson's attitude. Such rnarginalised authonty is well established, but what impact did this have on the nature of women's memoirs? War literature written by women is directly informed not simply by a need to 'mitigate' their expenence but also to convince the rest of their generation that women, too. were significant pamcipants in the war - whether 'passive' or

'active'. Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth is by its very title evidence of this; her

" Storm Jameson. No Tirne Uke the Present (London: Cassell and Company Ltd.:1933), p. 185. 43 aim was to tell her story as a mernorial for the dead and (more to the point) summarily represent the experience of the war generation per se. Such presurnption is unique among war memorialists: no other writer, male or female, claimed the right to set down a 'testament' for the war generation by telling their individual story. Yet her narrative remains essentially emotional, despite her endeavour to describe (objectively) the horror of war. its impact on society. and to plead the case for pacifisrn. Describing her feelings on visiting Amiens Cathedra1 en route to her brother's grave-site in the summer of 1921, she realised

...with sudden surprise that the anger and resentment had died long ago, leaving only an evedasting sorrow, and a passionate pity which I did not yet know quite how to use or to express. But then, I reflected, I have only a penonal and nota historical rnernory; the Germans didn't really mean to kill Roland or Victor or Geoffrey, but they did intend to hold on to ~lsace- orrain ne.*

Brittain's ambiguities are unconscious rather than self-aware. Whereas in Goodbye

To All That Robert Graves subtly indicts the underlying political problems and cultural mores which brought about and sustained the war, Brittain's penonal joumey from the idealistic patriot of adolescence to the politically active pacifist and ferninist of experience merely infers a broader social criticism. Her polemic, when employed, retains the characteristically idealistic tone which she uses elsewhere in her praise of 'heroism in the abstract'.

Testament of Youth, p. 532, (my itdia). Until othemi'se stated. subsequent references to the text will be in parentheses and denoted as W. . 44 is the first of a genre: the 'generational aut~biograph~'.~'In the foreword Vera Brittain clearly explains her intentions: her urgent desire

... to write something which would show what the whole War and post-war period ... has meant to the men and women of rny generation. the generation of those boys and girls who grew up just before the War broke out I wanted to give too, if I could, an impression of the changes which that period brought about in the minds and lives of very different groups of individuals belonging to the very large section of middle-class society from which my own family cornes. ... It is not by accident that what I have written constitutes, in effect, the indictment of a civilisation. (TY, pp.11-12)

In so doing she constantly and consciously speaks on behalf of both sexes, of combatants and non-combatants alike. Brittain clearly felt no doubt that she possessed sufficient author-ity to do so. She was a member of the Lost Generation; she had been actively engaged in war-work at home and abroad. Further, as a woman who had experienced the war not only as spectator and mourner, but as a

'participant' who continued after the war to promote the cause of peace, Brittain was of the opinion that she might be able to offer a more comprehensive and striking record of the war era than had yet been written. It is evident that many years went into the planning and writing of the book - it was begun in November

1929 and completed in March of 1933 - and as her regular column reviewing new books for heand Tide demonstrates during the period from Oaober 1929 to

March of 1930, she was keenly interested in the failure to set "people really thinking, instead of merely feeling in the way that is demanded of them by the present spate 45 of war books ... which so far from being likely to bing peace on earth are likely to deliver us bound hand and foot to the next war"." In her criticism of contemporary war literature we can obseive Brittain's developing formulation of what was lacking:

Testament of Youth was clearly meant to address and correct such deficiencies.

Reviewing Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero in October of 1929,

Brittain commented on the current boom of war books. claiming that "ten yean of reflection have given to them something of the perspective and the spaciousness that the war publications lacked"." She went on to outline the different kinds of war books then being written: those which directly described individual experience of . battle without attempting to convey a broader context; those which placed the war in its social and historical background, describing the changes it wrought on society at large; and

Finally, we have a few volumes which endeavour to present the reactions of the war generation, not only to the war itself but to its lamentable aftermath - a subtler and more difficult task. So far as I can remember, no realiy important book belonging to the last category has yet been published. The greatest of all the war books will probably be one which follows the bitter joumey of the war generation from start to finish, and shows how even in later Iife its course was dominated by those four terrific years. But the time for such a book has not yet corne?

Death of a Hero falls short of her standards; despite its 'greatness', it is too cynical and disillusioned, too reactionary to be properly effective. She similarly criticised

82 Vera Brittain. 'New Books" in Tnne and Tide, November 1,1929. p. 1812. Vera Brittain. 'New Books" in Time and me, October 4,1929. p. 1 182. " Time and Tide. October 4.1929. p. 1182. 46 other well-known books, such as AI1 Quiet on the Western Front, and Siegfried

Sassoon's Memoin of a Fox-huntina Man. While praising their vivid depictions of the horron of war, she argued that they were not likely to be effective in the pacifist cause, particularly the former, "which evokes a hysterical fervour on the part of many, which betrays that they would greatly have enjoyed taking part in such an infantile regression them~elves".~~Her reviews of war books by men al1 run along similar lines: they are too likely to provide the vicarious thrills of danger or indulge in masculine reminiscence; in short, they are dismissed as being 'hysterical'. By contrast, she admires rnany similar books by women (such as Anna Segher's The

Revoit of the Fishermen, Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone. It's A Great War by .

Mary Lee, and Mary Agnes Hamilton's Special Providence. for exarnple) for the

'sober' qualities which "reject hysteria ...[ and] hold up a mirror to humanity, and shows it as a complex organism that cannot hop2 to Save itself till it has analysed its own elements without self-flattery; that scorns the sob in the throat that cornes so easily when it sees a legless man waltzing round the stage in his invalid-chair."86

Deborah Gorham cites Brittain's correspondence with Roland

Leighton in 1915 to demonstrate her realisation that the men fighting in the trenches often had little or no idea of the progression of the war at large. rather she

" Time and Tid8, November 1.1929. p. 1312. Bs Time and Tide. November 1.1929, p. 131 3. 47 was struck by "the irony that it was the men who were rnost involved in the war who were least able to understand its totalityMg7It is evident that Brittain was of the opinion that combatant men were too diredly involved with the immediacy of their war expenences to have the necessary perspective that might produce not merely effective mernorials but also account for the war's social and political impact upon her generation. She obviously held that her ambiguous position as neither soldier nor mere spectator gave her a unique vantage point frorn which to recount the total experience of her generation. Yet Testament of Youth constructs a specific picture of the war: she portrays the 'unsung contribution of wornen' in heroic counterpart

to the heroism of men. By using herself as the representative figure, however, ,

Brittain cannot sustain the manifold elements she attempts to bring together.

The central male figures of the text, her brother Edward, her fiancé

Roland, and their friends Victor and Geoffrey, are oversirnplified. They become simply the consummate Dead Heroes, in the portrayal of their characters and her relationship to both. She portrays them in the high Rame of sacrifice, and persists in investing their deaths with poignant meaning, despite the doubts that begin to haunt her. Describing the afternoon of the Armistice in London, she reflects on the

'Why couldn't it have ended rationally, as it might have ended, in 1916, instead of al1 that trumpet-blowing against a negotiated peace, and the ferocious talk of secure civilians about marching to Berlin? It's corne five

------

*' DebOrah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist I ife (Oxford: Blackwell Publishen. 1996). p. 234 rnonths too late - or is it three &m. It rnight have ended last June, and let Edward, at least, be saved! Only five months - itts such a little time, when Roland died nearly three yean ago.' ...With aching penistence my thoughts went back to the dead and the strange irony of their fates - to Roland, gifted, ardent ambitious, who had died without glory in the conscientious performance of a routine job; to Victor and Geoffrey, gentle and diffident, who, conquering nature by resolution, had each gone down bravely in a big "show"; and finally to Edward, musical, serene, a lover of peace, who had fought courageously through so many battles and at last had been killed while leading a vital counter-attack in one of the few decisive actions of the War. (TY, pp. 46142).

Brittain's horror at the waste of lives is consistently offset by her need for a noble cause. She is drawn to Rupert Brooke's 1914 Sonnets, finding them "unhackneyed. courageous, and almost shattering in their passionate relevant idealism" Cr(, p. 155).

Although she goes so far as to ask the question "how would Rupert Brooke have written ... had he lived until 1933?"(lY, p. 155), she compares his poems to Roland's letters from the trenches, and clings to a persistent faith that Brooke's poetry did describe "Holiness and Nobleness and Honour ... [as] the causes for which those sacrifices of youth and work and immortality were offered" Cr(, p. 156). Her early patriotism is transformed into pacifism. but both are informed by the need for rneaning which causes her to sweep confliding doubts and emotions aside with capitalised generalisations and the cornfort of her post-war activism. Lynne Layton rightly points out that Brittain's "tendency to personalise the war countered her patriotic abstraciions and fostered her antiwar ~entirnents,"~'but the transcendence

Lynne Layton. Vera Brittain's Testament(s)'. in Margaret Higonnet et al. (eds). Behind the unes: Gender and Two Wotld Wae (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). p. 75. 49 of her individual s~ffennginto the caus& of pacifisrn and ferninisrn does not render the text any less subjective.

Evidence of Brittain's unconscious hypocrisy and many of the inherent weaknesses of Testament of Youth have been well documented elsewhere. Lynne

Layton has made clear the disparity between Vera Brittain's war diary (published in 1982 as Chronide of Youth), and the later autobiography." Her genuine conflia between patriotism and pacifisrn is much downplayed in the latter, likewise the nature of her youthful idealism caused her to accept much of the propaganda she later struggled to reject. Maroula Joannou daims that, despite Brittain's socialist and feminist sympathies, Testament of Youth continually betrays her elitism and unconscious dislike of other women, and argues that "it can no longer be accepted as a feminist te~t."~~he'fundamental flaws' of the text are al1 due in different ways to Brittaints subjective treatment of objective events; these would be less disturbing had she not penisted in her daim to be definitive.

Testament of Youth is the only book by a woman discussed in Robert

Wohl's The Generation of 1914, a literary survey of the Lost Generation myth in

Bg Lynne Layton's artide (footnote 22) extensively compares the diary with the autobiography. exposing the dispadties Brittain ignored when writing the latter, as do chapterç 4.4 of Deborah Gorham. Seaiso Amy Helen Bell, 'British Women Poets of the Great War: The Problematics", paper presented in the Dalhousie History Seminar Series, November 8, 1996, pp. 4-10. Maroula Joannou.p. 28. Brinain's snobbery in confronting women of a lower social dass. is effectively illustrateci also in Jennifer Dickinson, "Wornen Novelists and War: A Study of Seven Women Novelists 1914-1 94ûn, M. Litt. dissertation, Edinburgh University, 1980, p. 253. See also Clare Tylee, pp.214-216. 50

Europe as well as England. Wohl asçe&that Bnttain's book is "the classic example

of English lost generation literature"" - which is the source of its fascination - simply

because "it made explicit ... the narrative sequence within which many English

survivors of the war had corne to perceive their past'? Certainly her story completes the necessary romantic formula of pre-1914 innocence and beauty described in her provincial girlhood and blossoming ambition, shattered during the war by the disillusionment of grief and the ordeals of her service as a V.A.D, and finally culminating in the bitter dislocation of the suwivor, as she returns to Oxford

and attempts to reconstnib a meaningful life. For these reasons, and the genuine

sadness which resounds in its pages, Testament of Youth remains cornpellingly

readable, despite the constant irritation of Brittain's self-pitying egoism. But

'readability' alone cannot suffice. Maroula Joannou pleads that Testament of Youth

may cease to be read as the monumental 'wornen's war book' and be seen instead

as a text which is simply "one woman's account of the war, no more, no less"'?

Although the statu of the work has indeed long obscured its criticism, Brittain's

presumption - monumental enough - in believing that she understood the men and

women of her generation well enough to speak for them is, in itself. a remarkable

indication of the extent to which complicity in the myths of the war defeat her

atternpt to unite the personal and the political. "To continue glamourising the

dead as perfect and unchanging" is, as Claire Tylee claims, "precisely what prevents

Robert Wohl. The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Haward University Press. 1979). p. 1 10. '* wohl. p. 111. Joannou, p. 51. 51

a proper political consciousness of war. of why wars take place and what they result

in."94 Brittain's faiiure lies in her refusal to acknowledge the ambiguities of her

endeavour.

The 'conscious ambiguity' lacking in Testament of Youth is well

illustrated in No Time Like the Present, written by Storm Jameson in 1933.

Discussing the legacy of contemporary war literature, she predicted that the genre would prove the rnost important literary development of her generation. The war

memoir and/or fictionalised autobiography not only attempted to place in historical

context the impact of the war upon society and the individual. but also, and most

significantly for Jameson. ultimately conveyed "experience ... that involved the whole self - of that time in the writer's life when he was most sharply ali~e."~'The authors on whom she conferred this distinction were not women: she cites Frederick

Manning, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon (her second husband, Guy

Chapman. himself wrote one of the most famous war memoirs of the time, A

Passionate Prodiaality (1930)) . Furd-ier, Jameson demonstrates a complicity in two

myths of the war detailed by Samuel Hynes. She clings to the notion of the Lost

Generation, that "hers was a generation of unusual ability and great promise and that both were destroyed by the Great War,"% a belief that resonates in al1

05 Storm Jarneson. No Time Like the Present , p. 149. Subsequent references to this work will be in parentheses and denoted as NTLP.

86 Jennifer Dickinson. p. 161. 52

Jameson's later work. The tone of much of her writing is almost apologetic, as if she acknowledges the relative weakness of her craft compared to the irnagined potential of the dead. Discussing her growing realisation "that the War had stripped my generation of its leaves and branches, leaving the bare maimed stem"

(NTLP, p. 94). she takes vehement exception to Bertrand Russell's daim in The

Scientific Outlook that not only was there "no evidence that a generation was partly wiped out". but also that individual suffering and loss does not constitute the loss of a whole society: "'civilisation advances by the rnovernent of world-wide impulses. not by the efforts of individuals"'(NTLP, pp.95 & 96). Jameson concedes the impossibility of 'intangible' speculation upon the loss to culture and society, but she does not relinquish the idea:

We have bad moments, we Class 1914 people, when we remember that our friends and brothers died in 1916, with the flower of the New Armies, for this, this 1932. But at least we have seen the best, and we know what's what (NTLP. p. 102).

Likewise, Jameson retains the awe reserved by rnembers of the Home

Front for those who had been lover there'. She acknowledges the gulf between soldiers and noncombatants by stating, first, that

Even 1 a woman realise that for the men who fought the War it is not over. not done with - nor will be done with until the last brain is dust to whose non-identity names like 'Givenchy, Thiepval. Gommecourt, Mametz have a meaning incommunicable to those who "were not there". (NTLP, p. 99) and second,

The distance measured in miles from England to the Western front is short. Measured in experience. it is infinite. The gulf which divides the women of my generation and the men who fought in the war is impassable on any terms. (NTLP, p. 21 1)

That is, the experience of war. while remaining vivid in the minds of the men who fought, was incommunicable to others. The 'others' were of course not merely members of different generations, but particularly women.

The subjective perspective of an objective event has become of central importance; for Jameson that subjea is male. The question of perspective and authot-ity as related to British women's experience of the war resonates throughout Jarneson's writing between the wan (I will examine her trilogy of novels

The Mirror in Darkness in chapter four). but nowhere is it brought so poignantly to a head as in No Time Like the Present. Partly memoir. the work is manifestly an irnpassioned diatribe against the evils of war written by a mother whose imagination is haunted by the memory of her dead brother and her fean for her young son; she is unable to exercise the ironic prerogative asserted in masculine memoirs.

The fint part of No Time Like the Present describes fragments of autobiography. Reflecting on her childhood in the once-prosperous Yorkshire seaport of Whitby, Jameson gathers to herself the sense of security ernbodied by the town: its industries, its inhabitants, the Stones of the churchyard, the graves of her ancestors, and above ail, the formidable strength and "unusual capacity" (NTLP, p. 33) of her mother. As a child she experienced a deep sense of continuity bestowed upon her by the weight of the past in her surroundings and in the community of an

uncompromising generation... [whosel roots were old and deep. .. It is we, our senses defeated by the machines and the saxophones and salesmanship, who are incomplete, made up for more than half of what we cal1 ourselves of tom scraps of newspaper. We have grown alike by imitating each other, forgetting certainties. Those others were whole, each to himself, a whole man or a whole woman. No wonder they seem to us 'queef. (NTLP, p. 30)

The tensions whereof she writes are thus described. For Jameson the war has irreparably torn asunder the ties between pre- and post-war generations; she is possessed of the malaise of uncertainty afflicting those who never knew Edwardian complacency. Yet she is aware that

there is something perverse in this savouring of the present, the living, through the past. Something that ought to be despised, fought, got rid of from rny mind. I am not sturdy enough to do it. (NTLP, p. 13)

Storm Jameson's initial intention was to write a memoir of her early years and of her friends numbered among the 'Class 1914', using fragments of memory often intenpersed with "matches of music, gesture and unattributed v~ices,"~'which clearly demonstrate the influence of T. S. Eliot. Indeed, No Time

Like the Present frequently quotes and makes allusion to The Waste Land and The

'' Jennifer Birkett. 'Doubly Determined: The Ambition of Storm Jameson". in Jennifer Birkett and Elizabeth Hamy (eds), Dete rrnined Wornen: Stud ies in th8 Co nstructi'on of the Fernale Subieç& 1W-90 (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 76. 55

Hollow Men; like these poems, it is fundamentally a cry of despair and an indiament of contemporary society. In this manner Jameson describes the years of her education. At Scarborough Middle School, exposed for the fint time to the world outside Whitby, she discovered socialisrn, influenced by the friendship of two brothen by the name of Harland. Upon matriculation she won a scholarship to

Leeds Univenity, where she took a fint in English literature. When she began an MA at London University (along lines of research organised for her and which she hated),98she lodged in a Rat with the Harlands and another young man from

Yorkshire, al1 of whom were graduate students at London Univenity. She became increasingly drawn towards the radical idealism of the day. In 1912, outraged at social injustice and skeptical of existing forms of radicalism, Jameson gained access via her flat-mates to a small. all-male society at King's College, calling itself the

Eikonoklasts. They scorned Fabianism and communisrn alike, and embraced A. R.

Orage's modernist journal the New Age with anti-establishment fervour. Jameson and her Eikonoklasts saw themselves as "skeptics, unavowed anarchists, selfdedicated to the unmas king of hypocrites, politicians. clericals, reactionaries, bigots and dogmatists of al1 ages and ~onditions.''~They had no clear formula as to how they might change the world, yet Storm Jameson believed that the 'new age' must surely be imminent, in which her generation would find the means to

She eventually managed to convince her professors to allow her to work on a survey of modem European drarna, instead of the assigned subject of Pantheisrn in French and German literature. 99 Storm Jameson, Joumev From the North, Volume 1 (London: Collins and HaBlill Press, l969),p. 65. vanquish the evils of society. It is therefore understandable that her years of youthful zeal, when her companions raged with divine discontent. might seem to her al1 the more significant when viewed from the hindsight of war and in mourning for her friends. al1 of whom were killed.

At this point Jameson finds that she can no longer continue to write in the form of narrative memoir:

The story of my life ends with the end of 1914. It is only worth telling in so far as it is general. (Engraving of the Port of Whitby. Family Group. Portrait of a Young Woman. c. 1913). The moment it becomes particular (as if I were to tell you how I married, had children, was happy, miserable, cuned, fortunate, scolded. praised) it ceases to be worth a pin to you. My beliefs and feelings on the other hand, will be worth nothing if they are not particular. Because I know that nothing can happen again with the lost sharpness and the lost ecstasy, because I am now more my beliefs than my feeling^,'^ I can write about them knowing that what has been written has found its level in the mind of the writer. (NTLP, pp. 102-103)

The text shifts perspective, becornes introspective and polemical; its anecdotes reflective and significant, without direct chronology. Unlike Vera Brittain. Jameson attempts to make her point by distancing henelf. with her particular story and her particular emotions, from the principal thrust of her message. She cannot continue as begun because, with the disruption of the war, the optimism of the 'Class 1914' has shattered and al1 the rules have changed. To evoke the past is to accept the ghosts it brings with it, the "small significant trivial intolerable things" 'O1 which

'O0 My itaiics.

'O' Wlnifred Holtby, ReMew of No Time Like the Present, TNne And Tide, May 20, 1 933, p. 605. haunt Jameson and inform the passion of her argument.

Jameson makes use of her detachment from the aaual events of the

war to hone her criticism of the post-war world. In one significant passage, she

discusses the contemporary masculine psyche in terms of contemporary writing.

particularly about the war or society in the aftermath of war. Stating that "a book has value in virtue of the experience on which it draws and the completeness with which

experience is realised and conveyed" (NTLP, p. 146). she points out that

nevertheless, "the more acute the sensibility of these writers the doser their novels

corne to presenting a pidure distorted by anger and pain" (NTLP. p. 156). That is, the men who are the more immediate victims of war are doubly estranged; by the

horror of their experience which causes them to view with s kepticism the civilisation which created it. and in turn by the sense of futility at such estrangement, "the feeling, one of unassuageable bitterness, that they are cut off" (NTLP, p. 156).

Without the ironic wit which characterises so much of this masculine writing, the

"rage of disgust. the mockery ... would be intolerable" (NTLP, p. 157). Further, she

describes war as the enemy of women, "which robs them of their identity: they cease to be clever. competent, intelligent. beautiful, in their own right. and becorne the nurses, the pretty joys, and at last the moumers of their men" (NTLP, pp.

21 1-212). Jameson clearly believes that women have a particular voice to contribute, to the business of memorialising as well as to the prevention of future wan. Despite her bitter reflection that "the world is not yet a rap better because 58 womeo have been let loose in it" (NTLP, p. 231), she challenges women to do more than 'fotlow and compete with men'. She exhorts women to try "consciously to redress the imbalance of a social system shaped and directed by men"(NTLP, p.

231), othelwise they too will be culpable "if civilisation as we know it ends in poison gas" (NTLP, p. 231). Unfortunately the insight Jameson offen is consistently hampered by the dogged passion of her burden. No Time Like the Present becomes a prolonged howl of despair: at the destruction of the war, as a lament for the fallen, and at the temble possibility of another war. The text is distorted by the eamestness of her appeal. and cannot find a singular. balanced voice. In the end it is neither a memoir nor a consistently structured polemic; Jameson is almost as prey to personal misgiving as Brittain is to over-confidence.

For Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson, the war was the central experience of their lives and the vehicle of their awakening to a fully realised political consciousness. Both participated in the myth of the Lost Generatio n; both continued to aspire to the ideal of social change. Both recognised the gulf of experience between men and women, but "it was a gulf which [Brittainj tended to dramatise rather than examine," '" while Jameson could only observe it, al beit with an insight Brittain lacked (or refused to see). The essential difference between their approach to the war and social criticism lies in the personal estimation of their authority. Brittain undertook to write Testament of Youth out of a sense of 59 entitlement, that she, as much as any Sassoon, had a war story. and that she was in a particularly advantageous position to tell the whole story, made possible by the faa of her 'detached' non-combatancy. Jameson instinctiveiy understood why any attempt to wnte a representative, much less generational, account of the war would necessarily fail: because of the disturbing and distorting effect of the ghosts who pervade al1 such books. Less than half-way through No Time Like the Present she acknowledges this:

I began to write this hoping to convey the spirit of my generation, subtle (because we were the last children of a social order founded on peace and expanding markets), and easily pleased. But I see that I have failed, and that it was certain beforehand I should fail . If I could write to my dead friends what could I say? I remember each of you as clearly as the living friend I saw yesterday, but we shall never talk to each other of those days and I shall never see you again. I am not resigned to it yet. (NTLP. p. 94)

Still later Jameson reflects that

... the difference between a good and an indifferent War book is decided by the depth to which their writen have been able to pursue their mernories. (NTLP, p. 149)

She attempts to carry her mernones to their thoughtful conclusion, neither does she make Brittain's mistake of twisting history entirely to her own ends, but she is stranded by her inability to bridge the imaginative gulf between England and the western front. The persona1 is indeed political - Storm Jameson and Vera Brittain each used their grief to articulate the necessity of a lasting peace - but Jameson undentands that no one subjective account can dernonstrate the experience and impact of the Great War. Perhaps the essential value of these texts lies in their 60

exemplification of the cultural and imaginative significance of the Lost Generation.

to which women, exiled from the activity of war, had a unique relationship. The

myth of the Lost Generation, caught as it is in a perpetual contemplation of the

dead, belongs particularly to women in their roles of Mournen. Further, it

complicates their feelings of guilt - associated not only with the white feather

campaign, but also in the incommunicability of the experience of warfare - that on

them lay the burden of the "misery and death of a whole generation of young

men."'03 Claire Tylee cites Northrop Frye's theory that "'the culture of the past is

not only the rnemory of mankind, but our own buried life'. He thought that to study the past is to recover not rnerely the past but the total cultural form of our present

~ife."'~Wornen's war literature, with its ambiguous authority. and its participation

in the Lost Generation myth, is central to our own rnemorialising of the First World

Wa r.

103 Tylee, p. 258.

'O4 Tyîee, p. 258. -3- 'Detached Cornmitment': Feminism. Time And Tide. and Winifred Holtby.

An absence of irony does not necessarily preclude a sense of humour, but it does render impossible that lofty detachment from the subject which creates a 'masculine' sense of assured authority. In this chapter ! will further examine the nature of British women's engagement in the political climate of the 1920s and 30s by looking at a particular group of activists and how they responded to the polarisation of organised feminism in the 1920s into the divided camps of 'Old' and

'New' feminism. The changing momentum of feminism, which fused into the debate between equality and difference. lent an earnestness to feminist writing which often inhibited it. The feminist paper Time and Tide, which often served as the locus for such debate. provides a context for the illustration of this struggle for definition. At the same time, the work of Winifred Holtby. a prominent 'old feminist' and Director of Tirne And Tide, emphasises her conviction that the war

"has laid an increased responsibility on wornen and that their duty is not only towards individual suwivon but towards society as a whole" .'O5 Holtby's journalistic and fictional oeuvre exemplifies a sense of challenge for women. Holtby believed, without hyperbole, that the experience of noncombatancy in the war had made

'O5 Jennifer Dickinson, p. 267. 62

possible the development of female perspective from that of an impotent Observer

into "the clear yet imaginative intellect which steadily refused to be led 'in' to the

~ar."'~That is, men had become the passive victims of war; women could if they chose emerge from their traditional passivity and fight with the weapon of their detachment for feminism and against social injustice. That her 'gospel of detachment' was characterise by the fervour of her earnestness is a telling indication of the tensions and contradictions surrounding feminism and politics which make up this chapter.

Tirne And Tide, a weekly journal run entirely by women, appeared in

1920. It was a review of politics, culture and the arts featuring provocative and

readable journalism by some of the period's most prominent women - and men - of letten. Yet it had a deeply earnest, threefotd mandate: to provide a much needed independent press to act as a non-partisan 'guide' to the "new and unknown world ... [in which] the great whirlwind which has just passed has left us standing 11 ;107 to bnng to women, as the new electorate. a deeper understanding of international and domestic politics and the implications of the power of the vote; and of providing "a paper which shall treat men and women as equally part of the great human family."'08 The women who served on the paper's staff between the wan induded Elizabeth Robins, Rebecca West. Rose Macaulay, Naomi Mitchison,

'O6 Wlnifred Holtby, "The Gospel of DetachmeW. Time And Tide. June 7. 1930, p. 738.

'O7 Time And Tide, May 14. 1920. p. 4. '" Erne And Tide, May 14. 1920. p. 4. 63

Crystal Eastman, E. M. Delafield, Vera Brittain. and Winifred Holtby. All were well

known writers of biography and/or fiction as well as journalism, were

wholeheartedly committed to pursuing. as ferninists, the manifold issues which

offended their humanitarian as well as egalitarian sensibilities. AH were conçcious of the issues they faced as feminists in the interwar period: the tension between 'new'

& 'old' feminism (affecting them directly regarding popular perceptions of the

leamed woman). expectations of motherhood public & private, public opportunities for women in the 1920s and 30s. as well as the broader social and political concerns of the day.

Winifred Holtby is the particular subject of this chapter because the dynamic between her fiction and journalism is linked by a sense of responsibiiity which rarely betrays an artistic ego. Despite evidence of what Maroula Joannou calls " mutinous structures of feeling that often lie beneath the deceptively decorous surface of woman-centered texts." lW there is a pervasive 'eamestness' informing her abivism. in fiction as well as joumalism, which is directly reflective of her struggle to effectively address concems of gender. culture and politics in light of shifting social structures.

With the passing of the Representation of the People Act in 1918, the goal of franchise which had until 1914 been the cornmon cause of al1 feminists was

'Og Maroula Joannou. p. 192. at last achieved. That the vote was limited only to women over the age of thirty (and that it was granted at the moment when "women were reminded forcibly that they were employed in 'men's work' on a temporary ba~is"."~Le. by being laid off en

masse from munitions and other war work), did not immediately dispel the elation and confidence such a victory aroused. As Susan Kingsley Kent has pointed out. the compromise was necessary given the new emphasis on 'gender peace':

... after the horrific events of the Great War. the spectre of conflict between men and wornen could hardly be tolerated; postwar society sought above ail to reestablish a sense of peace and security in an unfamiliar and insecure world. The most fundamental step in that direction appears to have been an insistence on gender peace... .111

Full enfranchisement must, it was believed. eventually be realised, yet in the ten years which passed before this occurred, feminist conviction became increasingly apologist and defensive, a shift which continued into the thirties. The political validity of the search for equality had been recognised, but its urgency had been dispelled. Before the war, feminists had asserted

'above al1 the common humanity of women and men' ... it had been unnecessary ... 'to prove the obvious, that women were different from men, every progressive desired and needed to show that they were very like them'. The war had dernonstrated to British society that women were competent and equal to men in carrying out the functions of the state, that women ... have 'a human value outside sex'. and in so doing had 'transformedi the womenis movernent. 'It has become necessary ... now to consider the points at which women differ from men'."2

110 Penny Sumrnerfield, Wornen and War in the Twentieth Century", in June PuMs (ed), - Women's Historv: Bntain. 1850-1W, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 323. 111 Susan Kingsley Kent,Makina Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in lnterwar Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 11 3. 112 Kingsley Kent, Makina Peac~,p. 116. The movement became divided anew between 'Old' and 'New' Feminisrn, which

continued to play into the debate about separate spheres, and the clash of

ideological (equal rights. reform of the divorce laws) and pradical (health-care. birth

control) issues which dominated the feminist agenda. Dierdre Beddoe, reflecting

that the major link between prewar feminism and the later wornen's movement of the 1960s and 70s was "a feminist consciousness which [if not clearly articulated within the suffrage movement] extended beyond the vote into an attack on

male-dominated culture as a ~hole","~was markedly absent from the feminism of the intenivar years.

The split between what became known as 'Old' and 'New' Feminism

reflects the political fragmentation that was to some extent inevitable once the vote

had been achieved. As citizens faced with the daunting prospects of postwar

regeneration, many women who had been predominantly concerned with suffrage

now put paqand politics before feminist issues. Since full enfranchisement was

seen as inevitable. its priority as a demand was therefore brought into question, especially in light of so many other pressing concerns involving women's status and welfare. The term 'New Feminism" was first used by Eleanor Rathbone in March of

1925 in her annual presidential address to the council of NUSEC (the National

113 Dierdre Beddoe, Back TQ Home and Due: Women Between the W~E(London: Pandora Press, 1989), p. 135. 66

Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, which had existed as the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, or NUWSS, before the war). Rathbone, who took over the presidency from Millicent Garrett Fawcett in 191 9, felt that the struggle for equality had triumphed sufficiently so that "'we can demand what we want for women, not because it is what men have got, but because it is what women need to fulfil the potentialities of their own natures and to adjust themselves to the circumstances of their own livesrrr .114 This effectively meant a shift of emphasis from equality to difference; placing concems particular to women, i.e. matemal and child health and welfare. birth control, and family allowances above the continued struggle for eman~i~ation."~Old Feminism, which in rebuttal continued to emphasise its motto of 'Equality First', countered that while such social reform was indeed a worthwhile struggle, insisted that equal rights, particularly in the professional world, must remain the central issue. In this atrnosphere of struggle for definition and recognition, British women faced the difficult problern of expressing gendered difference without being subordinate or politically counter-productive.

I

It was in such an atmosphere that the weekly feminist journal Tirne

And Tide was founded in May of 1920. Its board of directon (Viscountess Rhondda.

Il4 Joanna Alberti, Bevond Suflraae: Feminists in War and Peace. 1 91 4-28, p. 164. 115 For detailed studies of New Feminism, in ternis of the connection between family policy and fernale emancipation, see Jane Lewis, Women in Endand. 187O-t9SO: Sexual Divisions and Social Chan= (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984). and Susan Pederson, Familv. Dependence. and the Oriains of th^ Welfare State: Bntain and France. 1914-1 945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Mrs. Chalmen Watson, Helen Archdale, Helen Gwynne-Vaughn. Mrs. H.B. Irving,

Christine Maguire and Elizabeth R~bins)"~represented a group of women deterrnined that the new electorate becorne a strong and influential force. Yet they were aware that it would not be enough merely to publicise social and political concerns particular to women, but to provide a broader locus for education and discussion. The opening editorial stated the paper's mandate: to meet, in the aftermath of war, the

demand to-day for a more independent Press; ... a Press which shall aim ai showing al1 sides of the national life, dealing with them solely on the grounds that they are al1 interesting... . Women have newly corne into the larger world. and are indeed themselves to some extent responsible for that loosening of party and sectarian ties which is so marked a feature of the present day. It is therefore natural that many of thern should tend to be especially conscious of the need for an independent Press. owing allegiance to no sect or party."'

It was financed pnncipally by Margaret Mackworth Haig, Lady Rhondda, who, in her late thirties, was the divorced daughter of a wealthy peer. She was a longtime activist in the campaign for women's equality."8 A believer in the consciousness-raising potential of the popular press. she set about the task of creating a forum in which 'women's issues' could be publicised, thus educating and creating an inforrned female electorate. While the paper was to be run entirely by

ll6 Dale Spender, Time And Tide Wait For No Man (London: Pandora Press, 1984), p. 6.

"7 Time And Tide, May 14. 1920. P. 4. As a suffragist. she had been anested before Me war for setting fire to the contents of a pitlar-box in Wales. She also lobbied unsuccessfully throughout her life for a seat in the House of Lords, a right she argued she had inhented from her father. I have been unable to locate a copy of her autobiography This Was Mv World (1 933), which is frequently refend to by Alberti and reviewed in Tme And Tide, March 18. 1933, p. 322. women, by no means did it exclude the contributions of men. It was, however. not aimed exclusively at women. In her own words, it would attempt "'to mould the opinion. not of the large crowd, but of the keystone people, who in turn would guide the crowdrrr .119 Dale Spender. discussing Rhondda's vision of the paper, describes how, with

... the confidence generated by recent victory, and the optimism born of wornen's venture into politics. it was felt that men would want to know what women were thinking - and voting. Far from seeing themselves as associated with a 'low-status' and marginal periodical, Lady Rhondda and the women who worked for Time And Tide simply assumed that they were central and significant. They took their own authority as women for granted and reasoned that rather than dismiss this new and potentially powerful class of voters, men would sit up and pay attention. 120

Though it is impossible to establish categorically the range of male readership enjoyed by Tirne And Ede in the 1920s and 1930~~the letters page demonstrated a consistent male participation, and it boasted as contributors H. G. Wells. George

Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Harold J. Laski, St John Ervine, Aldous

Huxley, Edmund Blunden, and Stephen Spender. among many others.

Unfortunately. there has not been sufficient work done on the history of this paper to speculate about its readership except to Say that it enjoyed wide circulation among the educated middle class; the paper is available for examination only at the

British Newspaper Library at Colindale. Dale Spendef s Tirne And Tide Wait For No

-Man (1 984). a collection of articles from the 1WOs, provides helpful background

"'Paul Berry and Aian Bishop. Testament of a Generation: The Joumalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (London: Virago Press, 1985) p. 19. 120 Spender, p. 39. details regarding the people behind the paper. but no more.

Time And Tide provides a unique perspective on feminisrn and journalism in Bntain in the 1920s and 19305. It remained critical of al1 party politics.

Although it showed a certain preference for Labour and the left, it was, nonetheless. well aware of Labour's weakness in its policies regarding women's issues and was outspoken on the subjea. More generally, it continued to support al1 women MPs and encouraged more female candidates whenever possible. while providing systematic coverage of parliamentary debates and legislation and maintaining a constant eye upon the extent to which the female electorate was being fairly represented. Many of the staff were, for example, diredy involved with the 'Six

Point Group', an independent ferninist organisation founded in February of 1921 and which is indicative of the fragmentation within feminism that was already beginning to divide on matters of priority.12'

The Six Point Group was formed to provide an alternative feminist lobby for women who had become dissatisfied with NUSEC's shifting goals and therefore its potential for effective reform. NUSEC remained the largest feminist organisation, but was labouring under the burden of the difficulties faced by feminists after 1918; it sought the twin goals of an equal moral standard and

12' Members of the Six Point Group who were also Directors or regular contributors to Time And Tide were, in addition to Lady Rhondda, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, Winifred Holtby, and Vera Brittain, arnong others. economic equality, but it became increasingly divided from within, and its method of working through "cautious and sometimes cumbersorne structures", '" the chief of which was continued parliarnentary pressure. began to suffer from differences of ideological discoune. The Six Point Group. again backed by Lady Rhondda, established a different pressure organisation with the aim of punuing similar ends by different means. A 1923 Time And Tide editorial described its appeal for two reasons: "(1) It offered a non-party rallying ground for much previous dispened (and therefore less effectuai) effort. (2) It was a political instrument to hasten the ends desired, by the only sure means, ie., the Government measure. r* 723 As its title indicated, the group was based upon a principle of six points considered to be widely sympathetic as well as of particular urgency. They sought to secure satisfactory legislation for:

1. Child Assault 2. The Unmarried Mother and Her Child 3. The Widowed Mother 4. The Guardianship of Infants 5. Equality in the Civil Service 6. Equality of Teachers' ~a~.''~ The issues of major concern for NUSEC in the years immediately following the franchise were identical. except that the issue of equai pay for equal work was demanded not only for teachen but in al1 fields. industrial or professional. Further.

NUSEC also called for the equalisation of the franchise and for "'an equal standard

IP Alberti, f3evond Suffragg. p. 136.

'23 Elizabeth Robins. 'Six Point Group Supplement lntroductory Number. the Six Points and their Common Centrew,lime And Tide, 19 January , 1923. of sex morals ... involving a reform of the existing divorce la^.'"'^^ The Six Point

Group had a more pragmatic approach in mind. The demands were chosen for their

theoretical defensibility and therefore for the greater probability that they would be

widely supported and more easily met.

As a "definite practical body with definite practical rnean~".'~~Time

And Tide functioned as a popular mouthpiece for its systematic programme of

reform. Elizabeth Robin's 1923 article charting the progress and achievements of

the Six Point Group clearly acknowledged this:

One material advantage that the Six Point Group had from its inception. A participating newspaper behind it. ... Readers of TlME AND TlDE have not only an opportunity to follow the progress and checks to Six point policy. They will be able to trace clearly that likeness in history of the various Points - the central faa common to them all: that these reforms could be pressed home without delay if disqualification on account of sex were not still a governing influence in social life. To get to the truth into women's heads would be worth much to this world - akong other ways, in the granting of the Six Points.12'

The Six Point Group was by no means the only organisation founded in the 1920s

to be given a forum for discussion by Tirne And Ede. Others, such as the Women's

Freedom League. the National Council of Wornen, and the London and National

Society for Women's Service (which later becarne the Fawcett Society) retained

similar objectives, but none were so single-mindedly defined by their non-party

125 Alberti, Bevond Suffraae, p. 139.

12' 12' meNew Group". Time And Rde, 25 February. 1921.

12' 12' Robins, lime And Ede, 19 January. 1923. 72 determination to achieve legislative equality, i-e. address the " heap of niggling little laws that needed altering"'28and be done with it. The Six Point Croup, while rooted in the principles of equality rather than a specîal consideration of women's needs. was nonetheless obviously desîgned also to appeal "to feminists who understood a woman's contribution to society to be rooted in her role as a mother."'"

Erne and Tide likewise attempted to address the complicated divide between what was not yet referred to as 'Old' and 'New' Feminism by thus acknowledging that a political recognition of equality must inevitably give rise to a consideration of difference. Yet by 1926 the feminist split was openly acknowledged. In an unsigned editorial of 1 5 October of that year. Time And ride bernoaned the growing preoccupation of feminists with issues pertaining exclusively to feminine concerns, or those social reformers who tended "to see the women as a mere adjunct to the Labour Party". and distinguished between these factions and those of "the ferninist movement proper ... [whichl so far as equality is concerned, is no longer content to mark tirne."'= The article stated that a major indicator of this change is evident in changes to the constitution of the Six Point Group. It had dropped two of its points, widow's pensions having been achieved, and equal guardianship rendered praaically redundant by the passing of a parliamentary

lZ8 Lady Rhondda, quoted in Alberti. Bevond Suffniae, p. 167. Alberti. Beyond Suffrapg. p. 140.

'30 Tendencies in the Women's Movement". Time And Tide, 15 October. 1926. p. 921. 73 ad3' the previous year which was accepted by NUSEC but deemed barely satisfactory by the Six Point Croup. Despite (and probably partly because of) this, the two points adopted in their stead, which were to take priority over the remaining four, were clearly in the Old feminist camp: "1. Equal Political Rights; 2. Equal

Occupational Rights; and [the Six Point Group] has taken as its motto 'Equality

~irst."""~Tirne And Tide was not only quick to discern and comment upon the hazards of fadionalism, but also urged women to think critically about their place in society as ferninists and as practical politicians: equal citizens foremost above al1 considerations pertaining to their sex.

Time And Tide's insistence on equality first, coupled with its criticism of NUSEC's continued emphasis of such issues as birth control and family endowment os priorities, did much to widen - rather than narrow. as it intended - the ideological and pragmatic gap that was dividing feminism. While NUSEC and the Six Point Group did work effectively together to achieve equal franchise, the

latter organisation with its Time And Ti& connections was voluble in its dissatisfaction with I 3USEC's New Feminist inclination. Further, Time And Tide publicised NUSEC's growing interna1 strife. such as the resignation of nearly half

its executive cou nciI over the council's interpretation of equality at the annual council meeting in the spring of 1927. The paper's articles and letters to the editor

131 The Equal Guardianship Act, 1925. lp'Tendencies in the Women's Movement". TNne And Tide. 15 October. 1926. p. 921. throughout this penod are marked by frequent references to NUSEC. the Six Point

Group, the problem of equality and the future of feminism. There was considerable

impatience evident on al1 sides.

A particular episode illustrates this. Retuming from South Africa in the

last week of July 1926, Winifred Holtby was alarmed at the apparent ascendancy of

New Feminism. A 12 July article had appeared in The Yorkshire Post by €va

Hubback, NUSEC's parliamentary secretary, defining the division and deriding the

"Old Feminists, who view with misgiving any 'decline from the pure milk of the

word' of 'equality of liberties, status and opportunities between men and

women trr 133 while representing the New Feminists as the voice of reason. certain

that such equality would inevitably corne and that in the meantirne they must look

beyond such trifles to address the reforms particular to women's lives which only

they. as women, could achieve. Winifred Holtby responded in The Yorkshire Post

of 26 July (repnnted in Tirne And Tide on 6 August) with an effective indictment of

Hubback's argument:

Of coune, sex differentiation is important; but its influence on human life is likely to be underestimated, and the Old Feminists believe that hitherto it has been allowed too wide a lordship. ... Hitherto, society has drawn on prime division horizontally between two sections of people. the line of sex differentiation, with men above and women below. The Old Feminists believe that the conception of this line, and the attempt to preserve it by political and economic laws and social traditions not only checks the development of the woman's personality, but prevents her from making the contribution to the common good which is the privilege and obligation of

'" Winifred Holtby, *Feminism DividecP. in Time and Tide, August 6,1926, p. 71 4. every human being.

She went on to assert:

Penonally I am a feminist. and an Old Feminist, because I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end of the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestion of sex warfare. the very name of feminist. I want to be about the work in which my real interests lie. the study of inter-race relationships, the writing of novels and so forth. But while inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist, and an Old Feminist, with the rnotto Equality First. And I shan't be happy till I get it.'"

Both Eva Hubback and Eleanor Rathbone had opportunity for rebuttal over the next months. The arguments continued across the pages of Time And Tide, the banter extending beyond the movements' leaders to the paper's readers. For example. an editorial in October commended the pledge of the National Women's

Labour Conference to lobby the Labour Party Executive for "the removal of the embargo at present placed by the Ministry of Health on [the availability] of information on birth control", but went on to comment "it is true that, properly speaking, information as to artificial methods of birth control has nothing whatever to do with fern~nism."'~~One reader, Edith How Martyn, complained at Time And

Tide's tendency to 'cap and criticise' NUSEC and other groups "...for activities which you do not consider feminist. This is especially regrettable in the case of Birth

Control. which is the one thing which puts women on a real sex equality with

'" Winifred Holtby. Time and Tid8. August 6. 1926, p. 714. '" "Tendencies in the Woman's Movement". TMlie And Tide, October 15.1926. p. 921 76

men. "'% As Joanna Alberti comments, "the friction underlying ...this [general]

correspondence was that between the NUSEC as an organisation which could claim

a long tradition of patient lobbying. and the Six Point Group as a newer, smaller and

less disparate body."137This is true, but they were also playing out their 'banle'

upon the pages of a newspaper which despite its Old Ferninist prejudice had a

broader scope and appeal than other contemporary feminist papers, such as The

Woman's Leader (primarily supportive of Eleanor Rathbone and NUSEC) or The

Cornmon Cause.

Ultimately, Time And Ede differed from other feminist papers in that

it was devoted to an "examination of society and the specific part played by

conventional politics from a woman's perspe~tive",'~~that is, by addressing the

whole in context. Its success is essentially due to the remarkable nature of the staff

Margaret Rhondda hired: feminists and writers of serious repute. That so many of these women were also writers of fiction. whose literary and theatrical reviews, as well as shorter pieces of fiction were often published together with their social and

political comrnentary, is the key to the paper's dynamism. It was from the outset a

literary and cultural review as much as a political paper. and remained so until after the Second World War, when eventually it lost its reforming zeal and became

'36 Edith How Martyn. 'Feminism: Letten to the Editof. Time And Tide, November 26. 1926, p. 1088 '" Alberti. Be~ondSuffraag. p. 167. '" Spender, p. 13. 77 increasingly focused upon the arts until it merged with John O' London in 1963.'"

Its fint twenty yean of production, however, dernonstrate the sober enthusiasm with which these women engaged in the issues of the day, twinning politics and culture with theoretical and pragrnatic approaches alike. The paper, as a site of debate about the feminist divide in the two decades between the wars, not only helped define the essential question of equality and difference which is at the heart of the matter, but also indicates that far from being "'largely academic"','" the problems posed by the direction of feminism are crucial to any understanding of the lives of

British middle-class women during the period. The paper's contextual approach to society reflects this.

II

Time And Tide is of use as a common source for the journalism of

Winifred Holtby not only because the nature of the paper itself is worth examination (and has rarely been examined in any depth), but for two further reasons. First, by providing a glimpse into the breadth of Holtby's work for the paper, and the lively diversity of her many subjects of interest (with some comparative reference to the other female staff), the variety of discourse within the paper itself will be further exemplified; and secondly, there is but one source available in which permission has been granted to reprint her articles: Testament

39 1 Spender, p. 21. 140 The Woman's Leader, December 1926, quoted in Alberti, Bevond Suffrag~,p. 169. 78 of a Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain & Winifred Holtbb edited by Paul

Berry (Holtby's literary executor and Brittain's biographer) and Alan Bishop (the editor of Brittain's diary) - which contains selected articles by Holtby from Time &

Tide and other publications such as the Yorkshire Post, the Women's International

League for Peace and Freedom, the Manchester Guardian, the New Statesman and the Evening Standard. Time And Tide itself is located only at the Colindale

Newspaper Library in London, yet Holtby's contributions to it not only represent the vast majority of her prolific if short-lived career, but are the most valuable resource for an examination of her work and its representative relevance of her struggle for "'a sort of bloodless revolution.rrrl41

Winifred Holtby (1 898 - 1935) is best known today as Vera Brittain's friend and colleague, who features prominently in Testament of Youth and is the subject of Brittain's 1937 biography Testament of Friendshi~.Yet at the time of her death of renal sclerosis at the age of thirty-seven she was justly famous in her own right as a journatist, novelist, feminist, and tireless worker for innumerable causes including the League of Nations, the Labour Party, the Six Point Group, poor relief, and the rights of native South Africans as well as those of minority races living in

Britain. She was brought up within an extremely loving family on a small farming estate in the town of Rudston in the East Riding of Yorkshire, although she was sent

141 Winifred Holtby. Letter 10 her mother, 1933. in Jane Dowson (Ed.). W0men.s Poetq of the 1 930s: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 1996), p.63 79 at the age of eleven to board at St. Margaret's School in Scarborough. A mediocre school, it was nonetheless designed to enable middle class girls to earn their own living; Vera Brittain states that "even in Winifred's time it was assumed that the majority would follow some professional career and strive to ma ke themselves independent."'" In 191 4, quite by luck, she achieved her first journalistic success when her mother fowarded to the editor of the local paper a copy of a letter to a friend describing the evacuation of the school following a bombardment of shells from a nearby German destroyer. Her account was not only featured prominently in the local Bridlington Gazette but was picked up by papen across the country and syndicated as far away as Australia.

Despite this early triumph she met with disappointingly little success as a joumalist during her fint years in London after coming down from Oxford with

Brittain in 1921. though she became extremely active as a public speaker and general supporter of various political and ferninist organisations. Her first novel,

Anderby Wold. was published to some acclaim in 1923. and her journalistic efforts began to be rewarded. Lady Rhondda knew Holtby (and Brittain) through the Six

Point Group and other feminist organisations they had in common, but it was not until Winifred's unsolicited article "The Human Factor" was published in The And

Ede in 1924 that Rhondda realised "that Winifred Holtby was someone to be

Vera Brittai*". Testament of Friendship (London: Virago Press. 1980. First published 1940). p. 34. 80 reckoned with ... I knew that here was someone who counted and whom I must at once get hold of."'" Holtby became an invaluable member of staff. and was made a Director of the paper in 1926, immediately upon return from a lengthy visit to

South Africa. Although she continued to write for many publications. to the end of her life she was primady involved with her work for Time And Tde. Vera Bt-ittain wrote that Winifred felt that her work for the paper "kept her in touch with the surge and sweep of current happenings."" It is impossible to count the number of articles she wrote for the paper as many appeared unsigned, but from 1926 to her death in 1935 at least one (and often several) each week is ascribed to her. She wrote editorials and book reviews, short stories, cnticism, and articles espousing her causes of feminism, education, pacifism and human rights. Her articles for Time

And Tide are full of the 'reforming zeal' that characterise her life and work, but they also reflect the dichotomy which is central to an understanding of Winifred Holtby: as she confided to Lady Rhondda, "'1 shall never quite make up my mind whether to be a reformer-sort-of-person or a writer-sort-of-person.t tr 145

Far from inhibiting her, the two poles of Holtby's dilemma often complernented each other : she manages to avoid the heavy didacticism which plagued much of Vera Brittain's writing by instead employing a playfully satiric tone which she uses to great effect, and the humanitarian is manifest in everything she

'* Lady Rhondda, Tirne And Tide, October 5.1935, p. 1390. lUTestament of Friendship, p. 267. '" Beny and Bishop. p. 19. 81 writes. Her journalism covers a wide range of topics of national and international interest. The zeal of her articles is balanced by the humanity of her fiction, and two of her novels will be briefly considered here: The Crowded Street (1 924) and Poor

Caroline (1931). The Crowded Street paints a vivid and sympathetic pidure of the lot of young women of middle class genteel provinciality. It centers on a desperately shy and socially unsuccessful heroine who is apparently unable to fulfil her mother's one requirement that she many well, yet manages in the end to overcome the strict code of respectability that imprisons her and achieve a measure of happiness with the work she finds in London. Poor Caroline, a story of philanthropy and exploitation, is an affedionate satire about an eccentric spinster who dreams up an organisation for reform - The Christian Cinema Company - and colleas a motley

Board of Diredon of varying motives with which to pursue her impossible scheme.

Winifred Holtby was sixteen yean old when the First World War broke out. She greeted the war with al1 the youthful excitement and dread of a romantic idealist, charaaeristically summed up in the conclusion of her description of the bombardment published in the Bridlington Gazette: "'1 can only finish with an eamest hope that never again will England suffer as she did on that awful December

16th, 1914 - but if she does, may I be there to see. '"lu Muriel Hammond, the timid heroine of The Crowded Street, whom Holtby described as "part of me...- the

'* Winifred Holtby, quoted in Testament of Friendship, p.44. stupid. frightened part",'d7 longs to participate in the war effort. Limited by her inability to resist the domestic and social demands of her overbearing mother,

Muriel is tormented by her isolation:

She had a terror of finding the war over and herseif as usual out of it. She saw a triumphal procession marching around the city square of Kingsport, with braying trumpets and flying flags, and henelf isolated, sad, standing up a back Street because she had no part in the rejoicing. For those who were in it, the War brought suffering. and anwiety and blinding sorrow. But these were glorious. You could make a Song of them and sing it through your tean. For those who were not in the War, it was a grinding hunger, an agony of isolation; and of these things you could not make a Song. You felt no pride of loss. no glory of sacrifice. There were only shameful tears to shed, and the long ache of pain which had no remedy.7m

The War preys upon Muriel's loneliness. "She envied those wives and sisters with that envy of suffering which can bum most potently of all";'d' when a friend's fiancé is killed she weeps over the realisation that she is "hungry for her pain." Muriel's

'corrosive ern~tions''~-about the war are representative of her cowardice and passivity about life in general; she is irritatingly cornpliant. yet trapped by the expectations of her society and unable to imagine any alternative to the shameful spinstehood which seems her lot. As a schoolgirl she had dreamed of becoming a mathematician, but " her visions had faded before the opinion of othe~.""~

14' 14' Winifred Holtby. 1924. in Letten to A Friend. Alice Holtby and Jean McWilliarn (Eds). (London: ColIins, 1937). p. 288. '" Winifred Holtby, The Crowded Street (London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd.. 1924). pp. 139-1 40. '" The Crowded Sbeet. p. 126.

15' Dickinson p. 251. In the absence of a mentor her ambition founders until she is offered a means of escape in the person of Delia Vaughn, a childhood friend who had tried to awaken her in adolescence to the reality that "women in Manhington are not expected to have Ideals, only se^."'^ Ultimately the upheaval of the war serves as the catalyst by which Muriel finds the strength to reject the hope of marriage as her only salvation and take responsibility for her own happiness. Delia gives her her first opportunity for self respect by finding her a job in the office of the Twentieth

Century Reform League, and and she begins to build a purposeful, single, life for herself in London, sustained by the companionship of other wornen. Muriel's new independence attracts her village's most eligible bachelor and the object of her own secret hopes, but to her surprise she finds that she no longer wants hirn:

'1 can't be a good wife until I've leamt to be a penon'. said Muriel, 'and pehaps in the end l'II never be a wife at ail. But it doesn't matter. The thing that matters is to take Iife into your hands and live it, following the highest vision as you see it. If I married you, I'd simply be following the expedient promptings of my rnother and my upbringing. Do you see.71TSa

The war is not merely the backdrop of Muriel's coming of age, it is the vehicle of her freedom and enlightenment, which Winifred Holtby uses to preach the feminist cause to al1 women regardless of education or upbringing, and so doing attempt to "invest the life of the spinster with dignity."'55

lU The Crowded Street p. 93. '" me Crowded street, p. 306. '" Joannou. p. 101. 84

Holtby's own deepening maturity developed, as the war progressed. into a painful compassion for her male friends in the trenches, although she was aware that she could not understand nor meet with sufficient sensitivity the changes which the war had wrought in them? Yet she suffered keenly from an envy of isolation not unlike Muriel Hammond's, both from the action of the war and the pain of bereavement. and in 1% 8 (after a year at Sornerville College), she joined the

Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (VVAACs). The experience delighted her with its freedom, comradeship and activity, but upon returning home and resuming her studies at Oxford. Holtby "became obsessed with a sense of horror at her own immunity from ~ufferin~."'~~She had lost no-one close to her, a mercy that tormented her and recurs in her work with a sense of guilty shame. Eleanor de la

Roux. the independent. left wing protagonist of Poor Caroline, is haunted penodically by the discornfort she attempts to queil by activism and charity: "'1 have capital behind me, and education. and opportunities. All this ugliness and poverty can't really hurt me. Irm immune'. she told herself. 'Had one any right to be immune.7111158 As Holtby wrote to her friend Jean McWilliam. who emigrated to

South Africa in 1919,

What an unfair world this is! Sometimes I just hate it all. and most my own

- -- lSp This is described partiailady in chapter 5 of mentof Friendship and in Jennifer Dickinson, pp.250-252, as regarded her relationship with the young man Holtby refened to as 'H' and Vera Brittain cailed 'Bill', a ctiildhood friend whose romantic advances Holtby rebuffed in 1916 and regretted al1 her life (in 1935, as she lay dying, they agreed to rnarry should she remver from her illness). ln Dickinson, p. 254.

"Winifred Holtby, Pwr Caroline (1931, London: Virago. 1985). p. 65. - so far - good fortune. Every time I pass an unemployed ex-serviceman, every time I think of Vera, battling with her adverse circumstances, or of you, my dear, to whom catastrophes became a blessing, I am hot and angry with the unfaimess of it all. I hate fortune. She will not discriminate in her gifts of biessings and rebuff~?~

Maroula Joannou. discussing Winifred Holtby and other writen like her (such as

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Radclyffe Hall and May Sinclair), comments that "the fiction of the woman writer ... is an index to her own sense of personal growth. As

Katherine Mansfield observed, 'art is absolutely self-developrnent'. But it is also an index to the hard-won freedoms of women in the public ~phere."'~The

"intolerable burden of imrn~nity"'~'is responsible for Holtby's dogged devotion to the causes she believed in, a devotion relieved only by her gift for satire.

Winifred Holtby's great strength as a humanitarian was to suffer fools. if not gladly, at least with mercy. The characters of Poor Caroline are al1 fools in their own way, motivated by fear or greed or dreams of success or a genuine desire to do good. Caroline henelf is a poor. eccentnc old woman. living off the charity of her impatient relatives, yet possessed of the grandiose and improbable vision of founding a Company for the moral purification of British cinema. is at once laughable and sympathetic. As the Yorkshire Post critic remarked in her 1931 review of the novel. Holtby "'has pulled the comic spinster out of her rut, which fiction has made wearisome ... Miss Holtby's gift lies partly in taking a type that many novelists

159 rs to A Friend, p. 249. 160 Joannou, p. 23. Is1 Poor Caroling, p.80. 86 accept as ready-made, and in showing its enormously varied and complicated humanity.'"'6z She is manipulated by her not-unlikable Board of Directon, al1 of whom have entered into the endeavour out of mixed motives, and none believe in the Christian Cinema Company Save Caroline henelf. Only two characten. while certainly flawed, involve themselves out of sympathy for Caroline and her dreams of glory: Roger Mortimer and Eleanor de la Roux. Both suffer frorn the burden of immunity. Roger Mortimer. an intellectual young clergyman who, finding "no burden in asceti~ism"'~seeks to identify with the suffering of his fellow-man, first by entering the war in the infantry ranks, then among the slums where he "found it necessary to dnig his nerves with work and to stupefy his intellect with fatig~e,"'~ involves himself with Caroline out of pity. Pity, too, is the motivator which causes

Caroline's young South African cousin Eleanor to invest the whole of her small legacy from her father in Caroline's scheme, knowing that so doing she will surely lose it.

The overall tone of the novel is comic, although in the love story that is its secondary plot Holtby allows herself to seriously consider the difficulties of attempting to combine feminism and work with marriage. Holtby is critical of

Father Mortimer's disregard of his intellectual capabilities in favour of the slum work to which he is not ideally suited. That she exorcises her own doubts as to the

162 Ali- Herbelt. quoted in George Davidson, introduction. Poor Caroline, p. xi.

163 Poor Caroline. p. 129. '"~oor Caroline, p. 129. diffÏculty of reconciling intellectual pursuit with the necessity for good works in the male character who represents the church, an institution of which Holtby was doubtful and critical, distances her from the more obvious identification with

Eleanor. a self-portrait without journalistic or literaiy ambitions. Neither =an

Mortimer dare to ask Eleanor to make the sacrifice of asking her to marry him:

He could not ask her to share, or even to understand his self-irnposed obligations. She could go her own way, and he prayed that she wouid win success. For if she desired wealth and power. her ambition was not ignoble. She believed that society needed rich and powemil women. who had worked their way from obscurity to eminence, and she believed quite impersonally and firrnly in her own ability to accomplish such a destiny. At least she had the courage to attempt it. No obstacle of personal or domestic complication must hinder her advancement.16'

Yet it is Eleanor who can in the end overcome the difference between the two, freed by his refusal to compromise her:

It was not a question of a future Company director and Socialist member of parliament marrying a curate. It was a question of Eleanor rnarrying Roger Mortimer... . After ali, if one intended to conduct social experiments, was it not safer to share them with the most honourable and unselfish person one knew?... Why, after all, should one rernain celibate just because she intended to have a public career? ... He was ... the one man she had ever met who wanted his marriage to be an adventure and not a refuge. Why should she be so squearnish about his future when she knew perfectly well his odd ambition to remain a poor and oveworked parish priest? Why should she be so timid about her own capacity?...' The present generation of feminists must marry', thoug ht Eleanor... .1 66

Winifred Holtby may well have been thinking in these pages of Vera Brittaints

'experimental' marriage to George Catlin, which involved long separations and

lepoor Caroline. p. 246. 'BB~oorCarolin~, pp.249-250. 88 other sacrifices necessitated by both their careers. For Holtby herself, however. personal satisfaction could only be achieved in a career which combined wnting with

"practical work for the causes she believed in. "16' The craft of her fiction suffered at this expense, as she was rarely idle. and she exhausted her health by dint of unceasing work. She died before she could realise her full promise. although Vera

Brittain claims in Testament of Friendship that the theme of South Riding, Holtby's posthumous and most critically acclaimed novel. "represented the reconciliation, at long last. of the artist and social reformer who had wrestled for so many years within her per~onality."'~~It is doubtful that the reconciliation was ever complete, as she had always used as material "those preoccupations which had hitherto dragged her away from"'* her writing; South Riding remains simply her most skillful novel.

In a review of Satan the Waster (a 'philosophical war drama' by the essayist Vernon Lee. first published in 1920 but reissued in l93O), Winifred Holtby described Lee's war notes as portraying "the developing attitude of the detached obser~er."'~~She was deeply impressed by the clarity of Lee's indiament of the war and of "a public which finds heroism more congenial than justice.""' At the

'" Dickinson, p. 257. la Testament of Friendship, p. 415. '" Testament of Ffiendshi~,p. 415.

''O Wnifred Holtby, Time And Tide, June 17, 1930. p. 738. 1il Holtby, Tirne And ride, June 17,1930, p. 739. 89 same time she recognised the need for a new kind of 'warrior' for justice who must sometimes surrender his individual concems "to the sense of being in a movement which is more important than any individual judgernent of reality." '" Holtby is quick to assert the strength of Lee's position as a woman: as a noncornbatant she was empowered by the "gospel of detachment ... [to develop a voice ofl force. dignity and ~atire.'"'~These qualities are precisely those which Holtby exernplified in her politics and her journalism. Herself plagued by a survivor's guilt and complicit in the

'lost generation' myth that the war had robbed the world of the brightest and best of its men, Holtby continually emphasised her belief that the tragedy of the war had directed a challenge to women to take greater responsibility for their cause and the broader causes of social justice and awareness. In her both her journalism and fiction the earnestness with which she took up this challenge are manifest, although her fiction is a much subtler (and less skillful) mouthpiece of reform. The

Crowded Street and Poor Caroline reflect not only her feminist and socialist convictions, but also her misgivings about the indulgence of writing. Her fiction tends further towards satire, and indeed often targets 'do-gooders' like herseif, yet she rarely speaks direaly to the issues which underlie the novels. If the 'gospel of detachment' did indeed endow women with the potential to speak with a particular

'force. dignity and satire', it is out of a recognition of the passivity of enforced detachment and of a compulsion to engage fully and actively in the social order.

172 Holtby, Time Rnd Tide. June 17, 1930, p. 739. ln Holtby, rime And Tide, June 17. 1930,.p. 739. 90

A 1994 article by Joanna Alberti discusses the changing of "the political and sexual rneaning of 'womant as described in the pages of Tirne And

Tide in the yean 1928 to 1931 In it she describes an apparent shift of focus after the general franchise of 1928, which came to a head in the election of 1931, "in which women were required to suspend whatever might be their own common interests in the belief that those of their country, class, or political allies were more

~rgent.""~She notes that Winifred Holtby, who had been writing her study of

Virginia Woolf, put her work aside in order to campaign for the eledion, and that on the night the results were announced she became dangerously il1 for the first time with the kidney disease which killed her four years later. Yet Holtby was only too aware of the manifold issues which separated and threatened to pull apart her feminist goal of full equality, and it is unlikely that she would have begwdged another pressing consideration which kept her from her work, Save for the illness

(which had finally lifted the burden of immunity from her). There could be no one cause which took precedence over the other; nothing was straightforward for women at this volatile moment. Feminism could only struggle to achieve that clear eye of the detached observer, a detachment which could not afford to be ironic but was instead in passionate earnest.

'" Joanna Alberti. "The Tum of the Tide: seniality and politics, 1928-3 1", in Women's History Review. Vol. 3, No. 2 (1 994), pl69 Alberti, The Turn of the Tide: sexuality and politics. 1928-3tn,p. 185. 4 'And on Whose Side are You?': Storm Jameson. Stevie Smith, and the Politicised Literature of the 1930s

This chapter will examine the politicisation of literature in the 1930s, given the perceived threat of fascism and the approach of another war. in the context of the fiction of Storm Jameson (The Mirror in Darkness trilogy) and Stevie

Smith (Novel on Yellow Paper & Over the Frontier). These novels anticipate World

War II in two distinct ways. The Mirror in Darkness (written by a woman who considered herself a member of what she called the 'class of 1914'. while Smith was certainly a member of the postwar generation) chronicled the political climate of the

20s & 30s from a socialist and specifically anti-fascist point of view, while Stevie

Smith's particular brand of (ferninine) modernism goes straight to the heart of the matter. Her wholehearted 'engagement' with the language and acute observation of culture and society are ultimately representative of the essential difference, wrought by World War 1. between the masculine and feminine relationship to intewar culture and society in Britain between the wars.

The images of Britain in the 1930s which penist are those summed up by W. H. Auden's epitaph of 'a low dishonest de~ade'.'~~The economic slump,

'76 W. H. Auden. 3epternber 1.1939". in Robin Skelton (Ed.). Poetry of Me Thirties (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1964). p. 280. 92

mass unernployrnent, communism, appeasement and the rise of fascism al1 remain

major elements of its history, which are critically supported by the continued

prevalenceof the1AudenGroup' inthe Iiterarycanon ofthe period. Yetwhile the

work of such historians as John Stevenson and Chris Cook have pointed out the

fallacies inherent in a generalised view of the '30s as al1 Depression and hunger (by

demonstrating the rise of consurnption and relative affluence of three-quarters of the British p~pulation)."~literary history has yet to widen the scope of research by presenting the work of established feminist (and ferninine) writers of the period in context with their politics and that of their masculine counterparts. Although the predominant image of the 'Auden Generation' persists, it has been made clear, even in such Auden-centered texts as Valentine Cunningham's huge study British

Writers of the Thirties, that the canon of the '30s "must be seriously modified" to include "those customarily absented au th or^"'^^ resuscitated only by the Virago

Press (despite the fact that Cunningham 'lacks the space' to do justice to them).

This decade was the last historical moment in which poetry can be truly said to have been a central dynarnic in literary developrnent, with the conservative eminence of T. S. Eliot offset by the younger breed of public schoolboys-tumed-socialists. The 'Auden Group', among whose central figures were

'" See John Stevenson and Chris Cook. Britain in the Depression: Society and Polltics 1929-39 (Harlow; Longman Group, 1994). ''13 Valentine Cunningham. British Wnters of Me Thiioes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) . p. 27. 93

Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Christopher lshennrood and Louis MacNeice, with Auden the acknowledged Master of the school. saw themselves as a separate, politically cornrnitted generation. They had for the most part corne of age irnmediately after the war, and compnsed what Samuel Hynes called the " Post-War

Generation". This generation - which included the Bright Young People of the

Twenties summed up in the romantic disillusionment of Evelyn Waugh and his circle

- self-consciously believed themselves to be both the children of the war and the children of the Waste Land. It is perhaps their participation in this generational myth which partly explains the dominance of their poetical voice in the 1930s. given that they were an extremely insular group whose poetry is not merely self-referential but indeed is often self-reverential. This is not. however. to deny the general significance of politics and art in this period.

British literature of the 1930s was nothing if not deeply politicised.

Margot Heinemann, henelf a poet who later became a historian of the decade (she had also been a lover of the cornmunist poet John Cornford, who was killed in the

Spanish Civil War), credits the final destruction of "the self-image of the writer and artist as proudly 'non-political'" specifically with the rise of Fascism and in the person of Hitler:

this led briefly to an outburst of radical art politics. unique at least for this country, which has become something of a landmark for later generations, even if often rnisunderstood or mythologised. The moment still looks a 94

crucial one, and not only to those (like myself) whose youth it ~as."~

Certainly, life lived in the shadow of national and international upheaval informed almost every perspective of contemporary literary output. This in itself is reason to expand the scope of critical attention beyond the confines of the Auden Group.

Maroula Joannou daims that "the 193ûs was a unique period in which writing with overtiy radical concerns was seen, for the first time, not simply as an honourable alternative tradition. "lmVirginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1 938) was the most consciously feminist anti-fascist polemic of the decade. linking as it did patriarchal oppression and totalitariani~m.'~' Yet many other women engaged in the political-literary process of the time; in the simultaneousiy inward and outward-looking fiction of Storm Jameson and Stevie Smith. the personal and the political were linked by a particularly feminine brand of imaginative discourse.

I

I have demonstrated. in chapter two. the intensity of Storm Jarneson's outrage at social injustice, and of her commitrnent to the cause of peace. although not at any price. Her pacifist position heightened rather than isolated her interest in other political causes: "she recognised the political and economic origins of the

17' 17' Margot Heinemann, 'Lefi Review, New Wnting and the Broad Alliance Against Fascismw.in Edward Tirnms and Peter Collier (Eds.), Visions and Blue~rints:Avant-aarde Culture and Radical Politics in Earlv Twentieth Centuw Eurobe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 114.

''O Mamula Joannou. p. 192. '*'See Virginia Woolf. mree Guine= ( 1938: Hanondsworth: Penguin Books. 1978). 95 . threats to peace."'" She was particulariy aware of the links between poverty and fascism. Between 1929 and 1932, having left London for Whitby and become involved in her local Labour Party, she observed that the poverty of life in a modem industrial society threatened to make the idea of war seem an acceptable alternative. When in 1932 she returned to London - first having made a visit to

Germany - she found it "rny road to ~amascus."le3 Not only did the principle of totalitarianisrn appear clearly to present a deadly threat to the future of democracy, but the simultaneous cancer of unemployment at home gave off a

'moral stench' which, Jameson argued, stung the consciences of writers and artists as never before,

Describing the moment "when the moral and intellectual climate changed" (JN, p. 292)' she detaited in her autobiography the strange manner - after the spiritual hangover of the Menties and 'almost before they knew what was happening to them' - in which "writers found themselves being surnmoned on to platforms and into cornmittee -rooms to defend society against its enemies" (JN, p. 292). In the 1930s she sat on the Writers' Cornmittee of the Anti-War Council.

Writers in Defence of Freedorn, Congress of WRten for the Defence of Culture,

Writen' Section of the World Council Against Fascism, and many other like organisations. She sponsored the Peace Pledge Union, contributed to Peace News.

'" Stom Jameson, Joumey Fmn the Nomi.Volume 1 (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1969). p. 293, Subsequent references to this text will be ln parentheses, and denoted as 'JN'. 96

and edited the anti-war symposium Challenoe to Death (1933), a collection of

articles by Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Rebecca West, Mary Agnes Hamilton,

Edmund Blunden, and J.8. PrÏestley, among othen who had served in the wadU

Shortly before World War II she was made president of British P.E.N. an office she

held beyond the duration of the war and used to help Save rnany European writefs

and artists from Nazi death camps.

Storm Jameson describeci the moral impetus as it appeared to her in

There really was a stench. On the one side Dachau, on the other the 'distressed areas with their ashamed workless men and despairing women. Not many English writen had the hardness of heart, the frivolis; the religious certainty. the (why not?) noble egoism - noble or ignoble, the gesture is precisely the same - to hurry past, handkerchief to nose, intoning, 'My concern is with my art, what troubles are troubling the worid are not my business; let those whose business it is attend to it, I must be about my own...'

By coming to London when I did, I rnoved from the margin into the centre at the very moment when the cunent dragging writen into active politia was gathering force... I saw that two principles were struggling for mastery of the future. On one side the idea of the Absolute %te..- on the other aIl that was hidden in the hard green seed of a dernocracy which allowed me freedorn to write and other women freedorn to Iive starved lives on the dole (JN, p. 293).

Yet Jameson was too acute a critic to subscribe wholly to any one cause over

another. She was clear only about the enerny, and aware that she too was being

used by the 'puppet-rnasten' of sodalism. She was particulariy wary of Communism,

'" Diddnm. pp. 190-191. "The Intemationai Association of Poets. Playwrights, Editors, Essayists. and Novelists. 97

having the foresight to wonder aloud, in the midst of a crowd of English and

Russian writen eagerly discussing the role of the writer in the Soviet Union, what

was happening to Boris Pasternak. Jameson undentood the attraction of

Communism as "the outward and visible sign of a spiritual discomfort" (JN, p. 299).

and more than a literary fashion (offeting as it did the solace of a vigorous doctrine with which to combat the obvious weakness and pliancy of English social democracy

and socialism). As such she was sympathetic, albeit cynically, with the way that

Communism appeared more and more to be the only tnie weapon against Fascism. which came to a head with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Yet, about this time, fnistrated by "these solemn neo-romantia" (JN, p. 298). the young .

Lefi-wing writerç, Jarneson had a vivid dream of a dead soldier of 'Class 1914', who

represented the realisation of her fears:

Hear me, I'm bragging, I know what England was like in 1913. You can keep the change. Cornrades! I've seen comrades! ... You believe in reason, you believe you onargue people into tolerance and goodwill. I tell you, my girl. that drearn is as dead as l am. The new age is being prepared by unreason. to be brought in by violence. In that day reasonable people will be swept aside. ... This isn't the wodd I was bom into, you'll Say. Nor will it be. My love. your world's finished (JN, p. 298).

To engage in the discoune of war she must borrow a masculine voice: "at the very

moment when she most lucidly distinguishes herself from her contemporaries.

Jameson's success is underrnined by her equally lucid acknowledgrnent that the real distinction belongs to ~thers."'~~lhe voice of a dead man haunts her as does the spectre of the Great War. which had shattered her youthful idealism. and ushered . 98 in. not a glonous New Age, bvt an lntenegnum in which the menace would return. more volatile than before.

Part of the outcome of Storm Jameson's Damascus vision was a dissatisfaction with her novels to date; she was possessed of a "new passionate conviction that only society, only the crisis, was worth writing about" (JN, p. 300).

Storm Jameson's early ambitions as a wnter were motivated, she said later, by dreams of 'money and famet(JN, p. 111). The idea of writing for its own sake came second to her desire to establish henelf securely and successfully in the public worid; later she was conscious of an 'irrational contempt' for her chosen trade. Like .

Winifred Holtby she suffered from misgivings that her work was indulgent. which like

Holtby she sought to quell by injecting the political into her very penonal fiction.

Of modemism she was deeply suspicious. She rejected the "fashionable ... heresy of the 'pure' novel. in which fom, composition. have the supreme importance they have in a painting" (JN. p. 300). Brought up on 'northern sagas and Dickens', James

Joyce appeared to Jameson as "a purely disintegrating force" (JN, p. 245)' contradictory to the faa that she was - despite henelf - drawn to the "growing impulse to break the tmditional rnould, achieve a new fluidity. new and personal symbols for human experience"(JN, pp. 244-5). She generally modeled her style on the masculine neo-naturalism of H.G.Wells, something she later saw as a mistake

("this neo-naturalism was as suited to me as his false nose to a clown" (JN, p. 301)).

Some glimmer of modemist experiment is recognisable via the palpable influence 99

of T.S. Eliot, which resonates through Jameson's wodc, with its Wasteland evocation of fragmentation and despair. This has particular relevance when one considers

Jameson's emotional attachment to 'Class 1914'; she cannot resist reflecting on the

(relative) stability of the Edwardian era, drawing pieces of the past before her. shoring the fragments against her niins. Her early novels are crude, but in al1 her work she lays bare every event of her own life, "transforming the humiliating

powerlessoess of a woman in private life into the indiament of published sctipt."

So doing, her narratives also incorporate the pubiic world into the domestic details

of her heroines: political events exist on the same level as personal conflicts, neither

marginalised nor second to the other.

From 1932 Jameson began consciously to reconstruct her career. She

set out to write a 'roman fleuve' after the manner of Proust, Balzac and Stendhal.

to be called The Mirror in Darkness. "Like Stendhal, chronicler of the new society

ernerging in eady nineteenth-century France..., she writes to hold up a mirror to the

life that passes along the highway before her."'"Yean later Jameson described the

motivation framing her conception of the work:

The paradox of my life ... is that the genuine passions I indulged (hatred of war and injustice) did me as much damage as those I suppressed (violent hatred of a domestic life. love of change and gaiety). I was genuinely fascinated by the spectacle of a society in transition and convulsions. From that I concluded passionately and blindly that the novelist ought to be a receiving station for voices tising from every level of society; he must be like

en en ni fer Birlcett, p. 70. lm Birkett, pp. 69-70. the magi who heard of a birth and set off in the dead of winter, the way long and the roads hard, to find the place. The modern novelist's country, I said, is this new birth and the hard bitter death it involves: in one way or another its disorder rnust show through his words - or else he is a literary deserter and a cockscornb, a liar (JN, p. 301).

The allusions in this passage to T.S. Eliot's Joumey of the Magi are not carelessly placed: The Mirror in Darkness is precisely Jameson's attempt to reconstnib The

Waste Land as a political landscape, without a rnetaphysical quest. Yet the spiritual sichess of a nation is her subject, over which hangs the shadow of the Great War.

Originally intended to run to five or six novels, the series became instead a trilogy, consisting of Com~anvParade (1934), Love in Winter (1 939, And None Turn Back

(1936). The first two novels span the eight yean following the First World War, while the third is set, significantly, during the week of the General Strike of 1926. It is a densely peopled, often obviously autobiographical collectiont inscribing the shifting forces of social change with a representative series of characten, centrally bound by the life and career of its protagonist Hervey Russell. Neither is it neatly concluded nor satisfied. Hewey's frustrated ambitions and desires, as the "story runs on, novel into autobiography into no~el",'~~reorient and subvert her historical account of the interwar yean into a particularly ferninine crisis as it attempts to integrate the boundaries of public and private. Its very title, The Mirror in Darkness, while recalling St. Paul's assertion that 'we see through a glass darkly', refers not simply to the distortion which is inevitable in any attempt to paint a realistic portrait 101 either of the self or of society, but also to Jameson8s awareness that she is particularly compromised, that "a woman writing in the early decades of the twentieth century cannot, in honesty, deliver a clear, coherent image 88 .190

The trilogy is set in the crowded London of the 1920s. changing venues only for the periodic domestic journeys Hervey makes back to her mother in Yorkshire and in the sanctuary of her suburban home in None Tum Back, a place of peace inhabited only at rnorning and evening. Hervey, like Jarneson henelf, finds her ambition in the traditionally male discounes of politics and writing, and consciously atternpts to dissociate henelf frorn other women. She first cornes to .

London in the month after the Armistice, unhappily married to a faithless husband still in the Air Force, leaving her son in the care of his grandmother. Her cornpanions are male: those former classmates - modeled on Jameson's flat-mates at University - who have survived the war and, although stripped of their former enthusiastic idealisrn, are deep in the business of left wing activity. The male characters are portrayed , on the whole, with more sympathy than the wornen in these books (although there are relatively few women at all); al1 characters are flawed and complicated. Neither does she limit herself to the Company of

Iike-minded adivists. Jameson's imagination

... spawned like a salmon scores of charaden, politicians, ex-soldien, financier, industrialist, newspaper proprietor, scientist, writen, labour leader, embryo Fascist, the rich, the very humble, the ambitious who knew where 102

they were going, and the confused, the ruined, the lost. (JN, p. 301)

The villains of the Mirror in Darkness are the capitalists who profited richly from the

war and throve in peace. Marcel Cohen, the newspaper magnate and financier,

"flou rished on the disorders which have infected our civilisation, because he

accepted the conditions of disorder - that there are no spiritual standards of

reference, no human values - the only univenally acknowledged value is success,

and the only alternative to success is failure."'" Thomas Harben, an even more

'successful' industnalist, anticipates a post-war struggle for which he prepares with

ruthless obsession:

A cold enthusiasm kept his thoughts grinding at the mill. He thought in abstractions as concrete as steel rails and the keels of ships. When he used the words 'man power' he saw a half naked steel puddler, but far from starting in hirn the ideas of a common humanity this image only angered him. A sullen will in the half-naked man opposed itself to his. This sweating brute at his furnace had feelings, desires, energies, not used up in work. Strikes, quarrels about hours - crowning impudence, the talk of nationalising this industry and that. ... lt was ~tupefying.'~'

Harben and Cohen are prepared to use al1 the means at their disposal, including the

manipulation of the press, against what they perceive as the threat to national

security and to proted their interests. Harben forrns an economic council designed to expound "the sound economic doctrines of private enterprise; to uphold our great mercantile tradition; to discourage state interference; to combat the menace

--

'O' Storm Jarneson. Company Pa- (1 934: London: Virago Press. 19û5). p. 155. 'O2c0mPanv Pa- , p. 167. 103 of organised Labour; to oppose dangerous and sentimental notions of pacifisrn."

Set in contrast to these 'Old Men8are the demobilised youths of Hervey's circle, who retum to "the peace-time world to find themselves at the mercy of pro fi tee^."'^^ Among thern Hervey is pained, always conscious of the 'otherness' that has grown up between them since the war:

... for al1 that they had known each other so long and were more intimate than many brothen and sisten, never. never would she be anything better with them than a stranger in al1 that touched the ~ar.'~~

There is Philip Nicholson, who 'was not resentful'; rather the war had lent his

idealism a sharpened sense of urgency. He attempts to start a weekly paper that

is "pacifist, socialist, and classicist", the latter "because it is your romantics who

cover up wan, dictatorships, and the other nastinesses with their bad

sentirnents",'~but the enterprise is doomed to fail. Philip dies near the end of the

first novel. the result of a disease brought on by his war wounds, his ideals still

intact "Really, one cannot be sorry he died without having to admit he had been

deceived."'" Philip represents the noble heroism of the dead, lost in Flanders and

absolved of the hanh legacy of disorder that plagues those who were truly

'survivon'. The others are increasingly prey to despair. David Renn, working with

Heivey in the advertising agency they both despise, is sickened at having to write

193 anv Parade , p. 273. ~ickinwn.p. 196. 185 Cb mvPm, p. 43- 196 mvParna, p. 40. '" Co-v Parade .p. 174. 104

'war-copy' to seIl disinfectant He becomes, as the tdogy progresses, obsessed

with the suffering of the disadvantaged and filled with hate for the likes of Thomas

Harben. T.S. Heywood marries a wealthy older woman, the doyenne of a literary

salon, seeking security in the matemalisrn she cannot possibly give him. A scientist,

he finds himself employed researching and designing chemical weapons in

anticipation of the next war. Louis Earlharn becomes a Labour MP, but must earn

a living wnting for one of Marcel Cohen's newspapen, "consoling himself with the

thought that he can slip in some socialist ideas and educate people without their

knowing it."198These characten, al1 ex-officers, are unable to identify, except in

passing, with the working classes they seek to deliver. They are represented in .

vignettes, with pathos and pity, but the network of barriers between the classes

cannot, ultimately, be overcome.

Amid the network of plots and sub-plots with which the trilogy

abounds (1 have not mentioned half the recurring characten), the story is bound by

Hervey's public and private struggles; ultimately "Company Parade is constructed

around the difficulty of writing an honest novel, presented specifically as the

problem of a female author."'" Jarneson's resistance to the idea of a gendered

voice, as she stnves always to objectively "situate the fact coherently in the

complex of social and historical relations that gives it its meaning",200collapses; lg8 Dickinson, p. 196. Birkett, p. 77. Birket!, p. 77. 105

Hervey cannot find an adequate, truthful voice. Confronted with the divene, discordant panoply of mass culture, and with her own miserable, oppressive marnage and anguish at being parted from her son, the question of how to write adequately, if at all, recun again and again in the series. Jameson's political conscience finds voice in David Renn, who admonishes Hervey for her ill-constnicted, easily-publis ha ble early novels:

Don't you know you haven't any right to write novels unless you put into it this slum and those black troops being used to bully Gemans? We shall pay for both crimes. Propaganda novels, Hervey said. ...Who writes any other kind?... Whether you know it or not you're being used. You're either soothing or rousing people.201

Renn's point, "that every account is an intervention, and that intervention must be . a strong socialist polemic on behalf of al1 the poor and ~ppressed",~is presented against the views of the arrogant young (and successful) writer, William Ridley, introduced in a chapter heading entitled 'The Realist'. His views on the subject are clear: gauge the public mood, and write accordingly.

You don? want al1 this impersonal stuff. It only bores people. You want something penonal. Let them hear the voice. Not "this is a bad novel", but "1 think this is a damn bad novel". That's what people are going to want now. The War's knocked al1 your gentlemanly reviewers off their perches. Down to brass tacks - is this what I like or isn't it? That's what we want?

Later, when Hervey asks him to sign a letter from a group of writen in support of the workers in the General Strike, he refuses:

When I want to do something for these poor brutes of miners l'II write a good novel about them. That's my work, not climbing on platforms. You should know that, my girl. Do you cal1 younelf a writer - ! Now look here - writers don? seive causes in this way, they serve them by persuasion and art, I know what I'm saying and I warn you not to lose yourself in the wildemess, by God, you'll be sorry if you do -- You serve younelf first, thought Hervey clearly. She listened to him. with a polite srnile. His loud resolute voice. his conternpt for her as a dreamer, silenced her against her ~i11.~

Hervey's conternpt for Ridley is, however, marked by a sense of guilty envy.

Freedorn frorn objectivity - and from conscience - allows him to labour without

compunction. The fact that it is men who discoune on politics and literature, while

Hervey struggles to articulate these discounes satisfactorily, places her and her

work in the margins.

Hervey sees henelf in relation to the men who inhabit her life: her son

Richard; Penn, her mentally abusive first husband; Nicholas Roxby, the kindly man

she marries at the end of Love in Winter, who is yet defeated utterly by the war;

the friends to whom she owes her political consciousness yet cannot fail to

disappoint. Hewey is possessed of a great capacity for endurance, which finds its

complement in the working class figure of Sally, the wife of Philip's old corporal.

They pass by each other at several points in the novels, without ever establishing

direct contact, connected by their shared identity as mothers who must survive to

protect their children at al1 costs.

Jarneson's is not a world of easy developments or simple connections. In the flow of history, the point is to become aware of parallel destinies, set

204 Storm Jarneson, None Turn (London: Cassell, 1936), p- 20. apart by dass, but shaped by the same political, economic and penonal pressures.'O5 The 'parallel destirlies' of Hervey and Sally almost fuse into solidarity with the

General Stnke, but diffuse again in the acadent of dass. The devotion Hervey

displays in her work is edioed in Salty's energetic devotion to her domestic duties

as housekeeper and tare giver, but Sally can be offered no relief. Her husband

loses his job, and betrayed by the union and labour leaders, they are left destitute.

Simultaneously, Hervey is offered a means of escape. Recovering, at the end of the

book, from an operation for cancer, she is exutted "by the sudden answer of her

blind patience to the challenge offear and weakness."" She is absolved from the

need to work and her buming ambition by her physical weab,and fin& sudden *

sanctity in her rniddle dass identity. She - and her son - are safe; her second

husband has some means and is devoted to her. Hervey withdraws, content at last

to be "no one, obscure, taught by pain."m She has the luxury to do so; Sally

cannot, trapped as she is in a different kind of collective obscurity, this one the

stuff of nightmares:

She was with other women, walkng across an endless stretch of ground. They were al1 afraid, because they were in danger, and they were without food or homes. She had the littie girl with her, grown a few years older. In some queer way she was the child, and thought as the child, while she was still herself. In their fiight they came to a dl;it was empty and as they stuod round it the temptation seized her to throw the child into the p& so that she would no longer have her dragging at her amis and crying for food. ... The fear and the temptation slid together in her mind with the shadowy figures

--

~OSBidcett, p. 82 Nme Tum p. 31 9. 207 SJone Tum 6a&, p. 319. of the other women. She awoke shaking with te~or.~ Ail three novels recognise the different limitations of class. but in None Turn Back. class politics are Iinked by sexual politics. Jameson tums the mirror away from henelf. "This is not the isolated stniggle of a middle-class woman to satisfy ambition in a patnarchal world. This novel refuses to concede freedom to one woman, as long as the mass of women (and men) rernain imprisoned."" Yet

Hervey, succumbing to dornestic convention, "declares henelf marginal to the narrative of conflict between Fascism and ~ocialism,"~~~ustas the Strike is declared a failure. The Ienemy rises.

Storm Jameson abandoned The Mirror in Darkness after this novel:

"What a devil to set myself up as a Balzac", she refleaed in her autobiography, "1 must have been mad" (JN. p. 329). Her fiction, she found, lacked a clear centre. The objecîive detachment for whidi she strove had defeated her; she agreed with Edwin

Muifs review of None Tum Back that the book was an imaginative failure "'because

Miss. Jameson's real theme is society, and al1 these people are seen as conditional responses to society; with the result that ... they can never speak to us: society is their ventriloquist"' (JN, p. 343). The trilogy is not, in fab, wholly a faiiure - her honesty, indeed her refusal to accept the impossibility of what she had undertaken

- are the source of much of its strengths. Rather, it is the 'neo-naturalist' form which

'O8 None Tum pp. 244-5. Birkett, p. 83.

210 Blrkett, p. 88. 109 cannot absorb such a complexity of shifting weights and structures. In 1963 Storm

Jameson, describing the eventual divorce between her political activities and her fiction, which occurred afier 1936, explained

I refuse to regret the energy spent writing polernics against war and Fascism ... I could not have held aloof. No regrets. A concem with politics, a conviction tbat political activity was obligatory at that time, was right. Wrong as wrong was the fillacy that political passions I could not ignore had somehow to be pressed directly into my novels. I confused an inescapable penonal cornmitment with a totally mistaken and crude literary one (JN, p. 34-41-

Jarneson's rejection of modemism. with its "particular opportunities for feminist cultural and political inter~entions"~"blinded her to the possibility of a tnily successful marriage between the personal and the political. Her rigid devotion to . realistic representation, conceived out of an earnest desire to speak the truth, fails as a literary tool because it, like No Time Like the Present, falls into polemical pamphleteering. For her, the failure of the politicised literature of the thirties is bound up in the shattering event of the Great War. which created an intractable gulf between generations and gendered experience. There are boundaries she cannot cross:

To turn back into the thirties is infinitely less easy. The survivors of my generation did not - then - realise that they had also survived an age and a world. Between us and that vanished world stretched four years of completely useless butchery, a wide furrow driven across Europe, cnishing out bloodily the energy, genius, intentions and plain decent hopes of millions of young men. Those left were survivors in a strict sense, men living beyond - at the other side of a closed frontier. (JN, pp. 291-292)

*" Janet Wolff, Ferninine Sentences, p. 54. II

In marked contrast to the problems which defeated Storm Jameson,

Stevie Smith's novels of this period leap anarchically over the frontier, resist the ideological terrorisrn of the late 1930s and plunge into the imaginative territory of war. Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) and Over the Frontier (1938) provide excellent examples of a ferninine experiment with modernism which internalises the political.

Smith subverts masculine authority with a playfulness that stands the serious tenor of modemism on its head. In her introduction to Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography.

Frances Spalding points out that the "anger in [Smith's] work, which takes the form of fierce social satire, is not submerged beneath or disguised by a false . deta~hrnent."~'~Stevie Smith's alter ego and heroine of these novels, Pompey

Casmilus, engages wholeheartedly with her thoughts and the world around her which feeds the thoughts. The Stream of consciousness form enables her to write a multiplicity of realities, and although it is the particular thoughts and feelings of

Pompey Casmilus which are inscribed. the effect is of univenality. Pompey's failings and hypocrisy are ours too; menace lurks in the corners of the most brightly lit rooms; Nazi Gennany could happen anywhere. As Pompey crosses the frontier from spectator to warrior, aligning the personal with the national, she sees with a clear, cold eye. Images of Pompey on horseback abound in both texts, passing through life (and war), as it were. From her vantage point, as a woman, as a soldier, Pompey is enlightened to a sober reality of deceit on both sides of the frontier: that the

. . '12 Frances SpaIding, Stevie Smith: A Cntid 6io9- (London: Faber and Faber, l988), p. xvii. 111 ideology of conflict poisons the spirit; to engage in any conflict, even out of the

"pure flame of altr~isrn",~'~is to participate in the base thdl of power. Richard

Church called Stevie Smith's work

a garrnent worn with courage by a tmgic spirit. The tragedy is there because in almost every phrase she utten, not excepting the rnany witty and hilanous ones, her purpose is to explore the cavities of pain and find a way out of their honor and darkne~s.''~

Stevie Smith is manifestly aware of the impending disaster of the Second World

War, but her form of political 'activity' is directed towards human understanding.

Novel on Yellow Paper and Over the Frontier belong particularly to the 1930s as parables of the actistic, political and ideological conflicts of the day, yet they are not hampered by ponderous imperatives or the weight of polemic.

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) was born in Hull - another Yorkshire child, like Storm Jameson and Winifred Holtby - and christened Florence Margaret.

Charles Smith abandoned his family for a life at sea when she was four years old (an act his daughter never forgave him). and her mother Ethel and Aunt Margaret used the spane legacy inherited from their father to move 'Peggy' and her sister Molly

- both of whom were sickly children - to London, where the educational opporhinities for girls were better. In 1% they settled in the semi-detached brick

'house of female habitation' in Palmers Green, which was to be her home until her death. Stevie Smith's childhood was punctuated by illness and the reserved wannth

213 Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier (1 938; London: Virago Press, 1989), pp. 256.

214 Francas Spaîding, Stevie Srnia ppxvii-xviii.. 112 of impoverished Anglican gentility. Her mother's weak heart expired in 1919.

Shortly thereafter Molly left home for university and a career, and Smith and her

'Lion Aunt' settled into the life they shared in Palmen Green until the latter's death in 1968 (only three yean before her own demise at the age of sixty-eight).. Smith found academic work bonng - she was an undistinguished student - and compensated for the monotony of the secretarial work she took after leaving

North London Collegiate by reading voraciously (everything except contemporary poetry, for fear that "'one will get the lines crossed and begin writing their poems. rtr) 215 She received her nickname at the age of eighteen, while hone-back riding in London one day. Some little boys. mocking her style, shouted "Corne on .

Steve", in reference to the then-popular jockey Steve Donaghue. The name stuck. and she was known as Stevie to everyone except her aunt (to whorn she remained

Peg or Florence Margaret) for the rest of her life.

Janet Watts recorded that "shortly before her death [Stevie] told a friend to correct people's belief that 'because I never married I know nothing about the emotions. When I am dead you must put thern right. I loved my aunt. rrr216

Externally, she lived a maidenish life with her maiden aunt in the suburbs. She experienced two periods of fame, in the 1930s and again in the 1960~~and was known for her lively and eccentric wit which she often tempered with an apparent

215 Sanford Sternlicht, Stevie Smith: Twaye's Enalish Authafs Series (8oston: Twayne Publishers, 1WO), p. 5.

216 Janet Watts. Introduction to Novel on Yellow Papa (1 936;London: Virago Press. 1993) 113 ingenuousness. Beneath al1 her work lie the 'mutinous structures of feeling'

Maroula Joannou perceives as a linking thread in intewar British female writing;

Smith continually mocked and resisted the conventions in which she lived: political opinion and hypocrisy, religion. her fascination with death, her social circle and her

'lovely friends'. Certainly she took the liberties of eccentricity, and was criticised arbstically and penonally for being tiresorne. But the peculiar quality of her insight and the deft originality of her writing have secured her a reputation as "the period's chief poetess and high priestess of the literary rna~abre."~"More than this, Stevie

Smith was a writer of unusual honesty and integrity, who confronted her own prejudice in an examination of the dangers of passivity.

Stevie Smith's personal politics are difficult to categorise. She was opposed to Fascism. and hoped that 'horrible Chamberlain' might see the folly of appeasement, but she was uncomfortable with hysterical fervour of any kind. She was disgusted with an anti-Fascist rally she attended in June of 1938,whose keynote speakers were Kingsley Martin (the editor of the New Statesman), and Cecil Day

Lewis, and described the proceedings scathingly to Osbert Sitwell:

...of course Kingsley Martin was on the platform. Though of course he only dislikes other dictators. However, Day Lewis brought the emotional house down by quoting for Horror - Goering. Goering said: When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun; And I thought: When I hear the word Kingsleymartin, I reach for my gun. And when I hear the word Daylewis I reach for my gun. (Not that I know anything about his poetry, but as a thinker. Why does he have to think such a lot - or rather to think that he thinks,

217 Cunningham, p. 64. 174

because really he feels. "We do feel, don? we? ..." The absolute c~rate!)~'~

Smith's consewative upbringing left her with the conviction that "'1 want more security' is a better Song than '1 want more happinessrrt , 219 and she was forever scornfbl of fashionable politics, bemoaning the tiresomeness of her n'ch communist ftiends ("'they have the cosmic conscience, you know, have it rather badly'"). ? She continued to spar with her friend Naomi Mitchison ( a novelist and political adivist diredy associated with Tnne And me),writing derisively after dinner with her one night "'more talkie from Naomi Mitchison, and she's got world problems on the brain too"', and to her directly:

Yes our times are difficult but our weapon is not argument I think but silence & a sort of self-interest, observation and documentation (1 was going to Say 'not for publication', but I am hardly in a position to Say that!) ... There is a sort of hubris in this worfd-wonying. For if you have achieved peace in your own mind, when the worst happens (if it does) you will have reserves of strength to meet it.

Stevie Smith's lifelong dislike of group attachments (indeed of any invasion of the independent province of her own mind), recun again and again in her work.

Pompey in Over the Frontier replies to the young Professor Dryasdust with the crie de coeur:

I am not interested to concentrate upon politics, fascism or communism, or upon any groupismus whatever; I am not interested to centre my thoughts in anything so frivolous as these variations upon a theme that is so banal, so

2'8 Spaîding, Stevie Smith, p. 137.

*19 Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Stevie: A Bioamptiv of Stevie Smith (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 107. PO Barbera and McBrien, Sevie, p. 107. 115

boring, so bed-bottom false, so suspect in its origin. C'est la vie entière que c'est mon métier- ... And jumping to my feet I cry aloud this sentence, that is so much more arrogant than al1 their arrogance, out-heroding the Herod of al1 their childish theories, that have in them so much power for harm, so seeming-good, so honey-poisonous. 221

Power comipts those who fight it; such an insight is reflective of Smith's particular fom of rebellion. The poetry and humour of Novel on Yellow Paper and Over the

Frontier betray the serious tenor of their authofs own patterns of resistance. Her apparent frivolity reveals, with her "'unique and cheerfully gruesome v~ice'",~a starkly tragic vision marked by a dichotomy between the assertion of internai and extemal character. As a poet of unusual wit and perspicacw, Stevie Smith's prose explores "'the beauty and subtlety of unuttered thought. "'pl The landscapes of these novels are lightened only by the singsong notes of chatter and the poignancy which issue from the authorial voice, al1 the while rounding out the shadows in a subtle indiament of British society and human nature on the edge of war.

Stevie Smith did not at first envision herself as a novelist. She sent a number of her poems to lan Panons at Chatto and Windus in June 1935, but was told to 'go away and write a novel', before they would consider publishing the

*' Over the Frontier. pp. 256-7. The Frenb, phrase may be ioosety translated as 9 is the whole of life wbich is my profession'. Subsequent references to this novel will be in parenaieses and denoted as OTF. Joyce Carol Oates. Child With a Cold. Cold €yen. New York Times Book Reiew, 3 Odober, 1982, p. 26. 2P Barbera and McBrien. Stevii8, p. 99. Il6 poems. Panons did adively attempt to encourage Smith. By August. with no sign of work on the novel, he wrote to her: "... there's no earthly use sitting down, scratching your head and sucking your pen. if you don't really feel that you've got it in you. I think Liz's suggestion that you try your hand at some humorous stuff is a very good one. and I very much hope you will be happier being funny than being a noveli~t".~~Perhaps Parson's mildly patronising tone incited her to action. That autumn the New Statesman and Nation published her first series of poems. Smith, wriung at home and on the yellow carbon paper in the office where she worked as a personal secretary to Sir Neville Pearson (fictionalised as Sir Phoebus Ullwater in the novel). completed the first draft of Novel on Yellow Paper in what she later described as 'a dream state'. No scratching of the head or sucking of the pen for her: the book was completed in six to ten weeks? At Parson's suggestion, she revised the novel, adding more conventional structure and punctuation, but unfortunately Chatto and Windus found the novel "too derivative of Laurence

Sterne's Tristam Shandv. too quixotic, not structured enough, and without commercial po~sibilities".~~~Panons found himself in the uncornfortable position of having to rejed it; to his regret the editorial board viewed the book as "'a series of isolated incidents, some funnier than othen'", and did not recognise what

224 Spalding, Stevie Smith, p. 11 1. The 'Uirefen to Parson's sister in law & Stevie's fnend Alice Ritchie, #en the editor of International Women's News (the journal of the International Alliance for Suffrage and Equal Ciüzenship). Accounts of Me writing of Novel on Yellow Pawappear in Barbera and McBrien. p. 75; Spalding, pp.111-113; Sternlicht, p. 6; and in Janet Watt' s intraduction to Virago's reprint of Novel pn Yellow Pa=. Ps Stemlicht, p.6. 117

Parsons saw as "'a continuously developing theme. a kind of spiritual Quixote's progress with a very definite unity and ~hape.'"~The publication of her poetry had already attracted the attention of Miles Hamish, a prominent reader for another publishing house. Jonathan Cape. who accepted it despite a warning to the author that it "'would not be an easy book to publish."1228 Amazingly, Novel on Yellow

Paper enjoyed immediate critical and commercial success. Almost overnight Stevie

Smith found that she had gained entrée into 'the London literary swim' of critics, established intellectuals, young writen and poets, the middle - and high - brow.

Even Bloomsbury sat up and took notice. The intimacy of the book's conversational tone also attracted the affections of the general public, and she was bombarded . with fan letten, "many addressing her as Pompey and disclosing the unhappiness caused by their own Freddies". The success of the novel led to the publication of her first volume of poetry, A Good Time Was Had bv All.

When Novel on Yellow Paper was first published in September 1936. the poet Robert Nichols wrote enthusiastically to Virginia Woolf: "'You are Stevie

Smith. No doubt of it. And Yellow Paper is far and away your best book. rtt 229

Nichols' assumption is understandable insofar as one recalls Woolf s essays on modern fiction which reject traditional conceptions of plot and character and promote "a roving, glancing consciousness receptive to the 'myriad impressionsr

227Barberaand McBrien. Stevie, p. 75. 228 Spalding, Stevie Smith, p. 1 14. Barbera and McBrien. Stevi~,p. 98. 118 that the mind receives in the coune of the day?' Indeed, Smith's prose follows no prescribed order. According to Frances Spalding, her reading notebooks attest to a fascination with the modemist stream of consciousness technique employed by Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Dorothy Ri~hardson,~'al1 of whom are echoed by her narrator and alter ego, Pompey Casmilus. As she warns the Reader near the beginning of Novel on Yellow Paper,

this is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by the left hand... And for my part I will try to punctuate this book to make it easy for you to read, and to break it up, with spaces for a pause, as the publisher has asked me to do. But this I find extremely difficult. For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts corne, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adom the tale. Oh talking voice that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you . with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?

This paragraph - added after lan Panons insisted on some degree of orthodox punctuation - expresses Smith's dislike of the restrictions dictated by structure.

Frances Spalding compares the original manuscript with the one revised for publication:

... following another's advice, she compromised her talking voice, thereby radically altering the nature of her text Once punctuated the book becornes more ordered and polite. There is a loss of flow, a stifling of the voice. Whereas before the book created its own pauses and rhythms, the introduction of correct punctuation artificially divides it up; and this segmentation of the veil of conversation, from behind and through which interesting things emerge, damages the reiationship between this flow of

230 Spalding. -Smith, p. 1 14. 231 Spalding. Stevie Smith p. 1 14. ZP Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow P- (1936; London: Virago Press. 1993). pp.38-39. Subsequent references to this text will be in parentheses and denoted as 'NYP'. . chatter and what lies beyond it?

What distinguishes Stevie Smith's technique is the directness of its 'talking voice'.

Her prose is never far from poetry not only in cadence but in its ability to distill meaning from isolated phrases in a manner rarely achieved in prose. Pompey's voice is the flickering voice of thought her chatter

dam and swoops from incident to incident, from the lyrical and poignant to die comic, colloquial and sometimes cruel. Pompey's interior monologue has an effervescent naturalness; she flirts with her readers, takes them into her confidence, reb& them, the book having an openness and imrnediacy that Virginia Woolf s prose does not allow.

Yet the insouciance of her narrative belies the sober themes which develop amid the . flux of Pompey's thought and feelings. It has been asserted that if Stevie Smith's novels "could be said to have a plot, it is a woman's struggle to identify her individuality in her threatened but dominant civilisation. " 23 Pompey Casmilus talks her way through a difficult and hostile world; an eccentric spinster possessed of tiger claws and a Lion Aunt responds passionately to the neurosis, vulgarity, and self-importance of the 1930s. to the menace of Nazism and the hypocrisy of the ambivalence and complacency that Britain displayed towards Germany, thereby giving Hitler license. Smith incorporates the public into the private sphere of her interior monologue, laying herself bare to public scrutiny.

233 Spalding, Stevie Smith, p. 114.

~34Phyilis Lasne?,*A Cry for Life: Storm Jarneson, Stevie Smith. and the Fate of Europe's Jewsw, in Paul M. Hdsinger and Mary Anne Schofield (eds), Wsions of War: WorId War Two in Po~ufar re and Cultur~(Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1992), p. 183. '120

The name itself which Stevie Smith selected for her alter ego is a dark one: Pornpey Casmilus, christenecf Patience (one recalls its derivation from the Latin verb patio - to suffer), acquired her mannish nickname 'out and about in London':

"There's something meretricious and decayed and l'II say, I dare Say, elegant about

Pompey. A broken Roman statue." (NYP, p. 20). Casmilus she took from the 1832 edition of Lempriére's Classical Dictionary, which misprinted the spelling of

'Carnilus', the Phoenician name of the god Hermes, or Mercury . The Classical allusions in her name are central to Smith's characterisation of Pompey, especially with regard to the figure of the rider. Quoting Sacheverell Sitwell, she announces that

Pompey is an arrogant high hollow fateful rider In noisy triumph to the trumpet's mouth (NYP, p. 43.).

And later explained in a letter to the playwright Denis Johnston: '"Casmilus is a dark name to fight under and he was a most awful twister he is the Phoenician

Mercury-Hermes but the faa that he had the right of entrance to (and ahem exit from) hell has always fascinated me.'"" Smith reveals the significant power she has given henelf as narrator, as flâneuse on honeback, by identifying herself with

Hermes:

Under what tutelary deity shall I place rnyself? Under Mercury, double-facing, looking two ways, lord of the underworld, rïding the white horse, riding through hell, opener of doon; Herrnes. (NYP, p. 212)

Such an allusion grants Stevie Smith, through Pompey Casmilus, the power to

zs Spalding, Stevie Smith., p. 117. 121 allude and expose the reader to a multiplicity of uncornfortable ideas and disconcerting insights with a disturbing freedom. "Pompey Casmilus' free-ranging thought parallels Hermes' uncircumscribed joumeyings; her ability to look at discomforting truths and intolerable despair parallels his familiarity with the underworld. As guides into another world, both are by nature well equipped to attack dullness and f~ll~.''~~The 'Casmilus motif' persists throughout both novels, although as Over the Frontier shifts tone and becomes a psychologically intense examination of the power of cruelty and racial hatred, she attempts to wrest from her this 'shiftiest of namesakes', 'this devilish Casmilus' (OTF, p. 31). In fact the

Casmilus 'muse' is what lends Smith her satiric detachment, which dissolves as ,

Pompey becomes a soldier but is reasserted in her final insight, which is coolly self-aware. The self-gratification inherent in polemic was distastehl to Stevie Smith; she preferred to plurnb the darkness of the human psyche using henelf as a target.

The figure of Pompey/Hermes permits her to do sol but only by stealing "the winged tuftfrom either heel" (NYP, p. 9): the rapid rnovement of her thoughts and reflections do not permit ordered contemplation, rather their quality of "glancing lightness... enables her to deal swiftly, but piercingly, with that 'vision of cruelty' presented by 1930s ~ermany."'~~

The first paragraph of Novel on Yellow Paper anticipates that the book will arouse some form of hostility - "Good-bye to al1 my friends, my beautiful 122 and lovely friends" (NYP. p. 9) - as indeed it did, and not only arnong those fn'ends d Stevie Smith's who saw themselves parodied in the pages of the novel. There is an "impression of anti-Semitism in Stevie's ~riting"~which has been both misunderstood and defended: it is at any rate central to understanding how Smith approached the growing crisis abroad and at home. Novel On Yellow Paper and

Over the Frontier both involve direct confrontations with Nazi Germany, but she "is found festering in her own 'mixed feelings towards the ~ews."'~Early in the first novel she makes the reader uncomfortable by declaring the elation she felt on finding henelf 'the only goy' at a Party, continuing gleefully

Hurrah to be a goy! A clever goy is cleverer than a clever Jew. ... Do al1 goys . among Jews get that way? Yes. perhaps. And the feeling you must pipe down and apologise for being so superior and clever: I can't help it really my dear chap, you see I'm a goy. it just comes with the birth. It's a world of unequal chances, not the way B. Franklin saw things. But perhaps he was piping down in public, and apologising he was a goy. And there were Jews then too. So he put equality on paper and hoped it would do. and hoped nobody would take it seriously. And nobody did (NYP, pp. 1@11).

Smith presents an image of henelf as the alien, the 'only goy' in a room full of Jews.

Her indelicate train of thought here traces an imaginative "evolution of oppression into destruction;"240 she is echoing the half-guilty sentiments of pre-war anti-Semitism in England, and she is aware of what the consequences may be.

Later. in Germany, Pompey reflects upon the neurosis she has witnessed in that

Barbera and McBrien, SteviQ, p. 80-

PS Lassner, p. 181. Lassner, p. 184. country:

And now look how it runs with the uniforms and the swastikas. And how many uniforms, how rnany swastikas, how many deaths and maimings, and hateful dark cellan and lavatories. Ah how decadent. how evil is Germany today. (NYP, p. 104)

Then, recalling her own shameful feelings towards the Jews, Pompey realises the danger of her earlier pride in "the happy accident of Nordic birth" (NYP, p. 12), that

"that thought alone might well up the mass of cruelty working against them" (NYP, p. 107). Smith's technique, here as in Over the Frontier, is, as Phyllis Lassner points out. "to double back on everything Pompey says to question her words as formative actsm, 241 thereby coofronting herself and her readen with their own prejudice.

'Liberal' England may have been regarded as the "'least antisemitic European countryrrr ,242 but even in its most liberal circles there existed a palpable sense of the otherness of the Jew. a "consciousness of ~emitism."" Stevie Smith uses her awareness of such cultural alienation to examine the seeds of hatred and destruction which can stem from complicity in the thoughts and actions of xenophobia. and lead ultimately to war.

Over the Frontier was written during the autumn of 1936 - at the same moment Novel on Yellow Paper was published - and reflects the increasing political tension which followed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini's invasion

LBSSner. p. 184. 242 Barbera and McBnen, Stevie, p. 81.

2U Barbera and McBnen, Stevia p. 81. 124 of Abyssinia,, and the Geman reoccupation of the Rhineland. Smith's use of the

'frontier'. an imaginative battleground which is well-documented as a recuning motif in the literature of the 1930s. marks a conscious claiming of masculine temtory.

As a literary device. the idea of borderlands or what Valentine Cunningham calls

"Auden's stirred imagination of the rnargin".240create the tension of inactivity (the

"poetry of the waiting ro~rn"),~~~which demands reaction. even in limbo. The movement into an a-civilised border territory possesses the fascination of the dangerous and the unknown, and serves to highlight the sense of impending doorn which must inevitably be faced. Again assuming the mantle of the male god.

Pompey transcends the talking voice halfway through the novel, as "the inner and . outward ramblings of the farniliar Pompey suddenly flow into the dramatic excursions of the new one."246

Depressed and melancholy at the ending of her love affair with

Freddy, Pompey is persuaded to take a rest cure in Schloss Tilsen in the north of

Germany. There she begins slowly to become obsessed by the threat of war and tenor for the fate of the Jews, coupled with the corrosive power of cmelty which lies within Pompey and ounelves. Pompey's movement from spectator to participant occurs with the frightening swiftness of a drearn. Pornpey is reluctantly awakened to discover that she has been transformed. Dressing for a terriQing midnight ride.

244 Cunningham, p. 373.

2*6 Cunningham, p. 373.

246 Janet Watts, introduction to Over the Frontig~p.6. she becomes aware that her clothes are not her own:

The flames on the hearth shoot up and their savage wild light is reflected at my collar, is held reflected and thrown back with a light that is more savage, but completely savage, with the flick of a savage quick laughter the light is tossed back again from the stars on my collar and the buckle at my waist. I am in uniform (OTF, p. 21 7).

The tension inherent in this stunning image is at the core of Stevie Smith's exploration of both sides of the frontier. Pompey in uniform not only anticipates female employment in the rnilitary, which was soon to be realised in Wodd War Two,

but comments on the psychological transformation inherent in passing from

noncombatant to cornbatant. The battlefield - or more appropriately, the

no-man's-land of the frontier - challenges the behavioural patterns of gender. The position of women in society must change radically once they have assumed this

most masculine of roles:

Never again in England I think shall we breed exclusively masculine and exclusively ferninine types at any high level of intelligence, but always there will be much of one in the other (OTF, p. 149).

lntellectual discourses on gender are to Pompey, however, "a game, for

intelligence is sexless and has its own weapons" (OTF, p. 151), although she pleads for women to accept the consequences of "the deadly partnenhip of men and women in war, as a substitute for, as well as a metaphor of, women and men in

bed" -247

Oh if there is to be anything of pleasure at al1 in the sweet uses of 126 heterosexuality, please remernber to be ferninine, darling Miss or Mn., but once out of bed, punue your own way. but do not make such a fuss up, it is for a dirge and disturbance of al1 peace (OTF, p.152).

Pompey is caught up in the fervour of her mission and the thrill of her night rides. and in her new identity - "this cloak is what there is for an outward and visible sign of my inward and spiritual sensation" (OTF, p. 220). but she soon becomes aware of the 'spiritual pride and intolerance' she has assumed as a soldier. She rejoices in her freedorn from the tediurn of society, and relishes "this turning towards darkness and death in darkness" (OTF' p. 221). A soldier is by definition corrupt; power and cruelty are his weapon and his enemy. As Frances Spalding comments:

This recognition of the power of cruelty, together with Pornpey' s realisation that her hatred is mingled with guilt and, though it pretends to be hatred of othen' cruelty, is also an expression of the cruelty in henelf, results in a book that offers no simple solution. While abhorring the will to power, it does not promote a non-militant pacifism and is too complex to be labeled an anti-Fascist fairy tale. Its acceptance of paradox and defeat as aspects of the tnith reflect Stevie's own thinking which resisted the patterns imposed by religion, ideology, and conventional morality. Thought, itself, she argues in Over the Frontier, is partial, not reflective of the mind's entirety but rnerely 'a torchlight flame upon a part of it'.248

By placing Pompey in uniform Smith is able to universalise the psychological state of the combatant. Pompey is asked "And on whose side are you?" (OTF, p. 157): a question she redire- to the reader. Her answer, assessing

"the drift of policies and the argument of history", and damning her own racial hatred which she struggles to be rid of, is that she is on the side of her friends,

2m Spalding. Stevie Smith, p. 136. 127 because "friendship is a more final tnith than policy or the argument of history"

(OTF, p. 159). What freedorn there is found in friendship and the anarchy of laughter: this is Stevie Smith's weapon against ideological terr~risrn?~~"Pompey very very bad soldier" (OTF, p. 137). she muses; "the heart and knowledge of

Pompey-Stevie were indeed no so~dier's."~"

The novel closes with a final rumination on individual culpability in creating the conditions which lead to war. Politics and ideology serve to caricature humanity; Smith's illuminative insights urge the individual to confront his demons.

The fiend who grabs Pompey's leg in the dark symbolises

Cruelty, hostility, obstruction, upon no dotty ideal, upon nothing so in contrast reputable, upon a smugness rather, upon a smug insufferable conviction; the backside of the world; the smug Rat note of that vox humana, We are so many. Yes. I have seen it before, this rat face; in London, Berlin, Pans, New York; in the villages of Hertfordshire. And now here, in this ultima Thule of beyond the frontier, and now here ? We are so many (OTF, p. 249).

This scene, the narrative's climax, brings Pompey sharply to the realisation that by entering into uniform she has chosen to pafiicipate in

a hatred that is not ... a pure Rame of altruism. ... How apt I was for this deceit, how splendid a material, that recognising the deceit must take commission under it, forever following darkness (OTF, p. 256).

Her previously kindly thoughts of death (her 'servant' in Novel on Yellow Paoer) provide no solace for the fear that power may be the "very stuff of our existence"

249 See Spalding, pp. 138-9. 2~ Janet Watts, Introduction. Over the Frontier, p. 8. 128

(OTF, p. 271): that we are al1 culpable in the pain of others. And yet she is able to assert that "Power and cruelty are the strength of our life, and in its weakness only is there the sweetness of love" (OTF, p. 272). In this last sentence, she acknowledges that her mission, her ride, has provided no answer, but that individual and collective responsibility must be taken. Stevie Smith possessed "the courage to violate the deadly silences of a passive aggression which makes war and destruction seem like the evil that othen do."251 As a wornan imagining the experience of war, her flight across the frontier represents a new parable in the symbolic literature of the period: the purpose of her nightmarish mission leads not towards escape, but to a human understanding that "our nature is rooted in pain . and crue~ty"~".Yet somehow the bleakness of Smith's vision is mitigated by her assertion that the sweetness of love is found in the weakness of cruelty; resistance may therefore begin from the heart of that power and cruelty.

Storm Jameson herself recognised the contemporary relevance of

Over the Frontier. At the tirne of its publication she told the editor of Jonathan

Cape

'This has the poetry, the malice, the sadness, of a mind particularly sensitive to something which is happening in the world, which pehaps only a poet can deeply feeLtzu

251 Lassner, p. 188. 2U Spalding, p. 135.

26j Spaiding, p. 147. 129

Jameson approached Smith. Claiming that "'wriren of your quality are desperately neededI1"* she urged her to join British P-€.Nt of which she was then the president.

P.E.N was at the time taking a prominent stand against Fascism and using its resources to aid European intelleaual refugees. Smith declined, claiming that the subscnption rates were more than she could afford. Her reluctance to join, despite the faa that she enjoyed the fellowship of other writers, stemmed frorn her dislike of demonstrations and distrust of political organisations, particularly among the

'affluent'. Yet these two women, so different in their ideas of political commitment and the necessity of action, possessed a similar revulsion of complacency. Both fought for the integrity of the individual spirit against the direat of fascism; as Storm .

Jameson wrote in her mernoir, musing over whether anything is worth a fight, that:

"to accept, as genuine pacifists do, anything rather than war, total disrespect for freedom. the systematic cnishing or deformation of the spirit, is to accept a death as final as the death of the body. Even in hell, one could not give up fighting for the freedom of the r~~ind.""~

Storm Jameson described the 1930ç as a time when "the present was an indissoluble riddle and the past a kaleidoscope of fears, anguish, and the death of friends", yet "it was very difficult for anyone to believe in the reality of evil

254 spalding, Stevie Smith. p. 147.

256 Storm Jameson. Journe" From the Norüt.Volurne 2 (London: Collins and HamiIl Press. 1969). p. 38. 730 men."256 The Mirror in Darkness and Stevie Smith's two Pompey Casmilus novels rise above the dogma of propaganda and pacifist appeasement and imagine the consequences of not confronting evil. As Phyllis Lassner points out, "yean before

Nazi Germany was official!y recognised as a global threat. Jameson and Smith were assessing the costs of denying it"" Jameson's continued horror at the rnemory of the First Worid War did not deter her fight against the realities of totalitarianism in

Germany and its possibilities at home, while Smith's bluntly honest crusade against latent cultural hatred bear witness to the courage and integrity of both. Storm

Jarneson's trilogy may be the more historically detailed work, but Stevie Smith's passionate detachment reveals the conflict at the heart of the fascist crisis of the .

30s. Stevie Smith resolved Storm Jameson's inability to retain her detachrnent in an attempt to incorporate conflicting theories of gender, class and society into a single work of representative fiction. by simply refusing to make explicit speeches. By removing her authorial voice from the inhibitions of realism, Smith succeeds in achieving a detachrnent which is al1 the more able to engage fully with the cultural mores she is calling into question. She is able to transfomi the '1' of individual consciousness into the 'we' of collective responsibility, fulfilling the potential of

Virginia Woolf's statement: "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole ~orld."*~

------

"'Jameson. Joumev From the North.Volume 2, p. 45 & 21. "'Lassner. p. 181.

258 See Joannou*~discussion of Woolf and Antigone, p. 178. I began by setting this thesis in 1918, and have attenipted to demonstrate the manner in which British women writen, concerned with finding an appropriate means of expressing their "cultural and gendered identity in terms of the new and changing social conditions in which women found thern~elves,"~~~ asserted themselves in interuvar discounes of literature and culture by making use of their exile from the experience of the Great War. Vera Brittain. Winifred Holtby,

Storm Jameson and Stevie Smith were each compelled to write about the forces of change in British society, taking into account the direct impact of the war, its indirect implications for feminism, and the heightened political tensions of the

19%- Each of them was manifestly aware that, writing as women, the fact of their gender could not be separated from the way their texts would be read. Having achieved enfranchisement, the paradoxical question of 'equality versus difference' took on a newly heightened significance for feminism. The postwar fernale was faced with the endless uncertainties of whether

To be, or not to be, 'a woman'; to write or not 'as a woman'; to espouse an egalitarianisrn which sees sexed manifestations as blocks on the road to full democracy; to love theories of difference which don't anticipate their own dissolution... .260

259 Jomnou. p. 190.

2m Riley. p. 1 13. 132

At the same time, women were also burdened by their complicated relationship to the four years of war which had imposed so seemingly irrevocable a distance between them and the men who had actually fought The imaginative gulf between combatants and noncombatants was the cause of a great deal of guilt, both in suMving and in mouming the 'Lost Generation'. How women remembered the war was therefore qualified by the 'problem of authority' dernonstrated in the mernoirs of Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson and discussed in chapter two. Survivor's guilt, and its subsequent 'burden of immunity' which so plagued Winifred Holtby, acted as a catalyst for political engagement in addressing feminist issues and contemporary social concerns. Yet specifically feminist discourse, and a continued struggle for the emancipation of women, in the aftermath of full-blown war and in the growing threat of Fascism and a second Armageddon, was generally perceived as secondary or merely irrelevant The need to be heard therefore lent an earnestness to this most anti-ironic application of detachment, which lirnited the effectiveness of the texts discussed here; only Stevie Smith, by removing henelf from the realm of self-conscious activisrn, was able to make full use of the 'gospel of detachment' in the form of modernist technique.

Exiled from the central activity which had shaped the early part of the twentieth century, yet newly enfranchised and able to take advantage of new opportunities for education and careen, middle-class British women sought a means by which to develop an authoritative voice which could engage wholly in the 133

postwar social order. Literary texts play an important role not only in revealing how

feminine experience was infomed by the accidents of history, but also because they

help to shape cultural and social formation and change. By deliberately attempting

to invoke a tone of detached observation, the voices of Brittain, Holtby, Jameson

and Smith emphasise their search for a just consideration of the links between

sexual and political discourses. As an historical tool. their texts allow a contextual

perspective on the role of women as historical acton. as subjects of socio-cultural

narrative, and offer "new readings of the two world war~."~~'

Joan Scott, a contemporary apologist in the field of 'gender history',

has criticised the feminist practise of simply "making visible those hidden from

hi~tory",~~~and called for a new analysis of women's roles in social, cultural and

political arenas by rnaking use of information about women's access to historïcal

events and the parts they played in them. In terms of the two world wan of this

century, she argues, women's experience during and in the aftermath of war

"provides insight not only into the discrepancy between domestic, private history,

and official, national history. but also ...[ can be used as] a means of analysing how

and by whom national memory is constru~ted."~~~Before such constructions can

be analysed. however, women's texts must be available for study.

26' Joan Scott. 'Rewriting History". in Margaret Higonnet et. al. (eds). Behind Me Lines: Gender md Two World Wam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). p. 25

262 Scott#p. 22. The canon of interwar literature has yet to take seriously into account the contribution of female writen such as these to the discourses of gender and political ideology which rnay enrich our understanding of the First World Waf s impact on British culture. Valentine Cunningham's monumental study British Writen of the Thirties welcomes the reprinting of 'obscure' works by women:

The feminist publishing imprint Virago has trawled most impressively and fruitfully in the novel catalogues of the '3ûs. Storm Jarneson. Stevie Smith, Sylvia Townsend Wamer, Rosamond Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison, Antonia White, F. Tennyson Jesse, Winifred Holtby: those resuscitated names from the Virago Modem Classics Iist are al1 most cornpetent novelists, and some of thern are much more than that.2M

Unfortunately Cunningham gives no more than a passing consideration to a very few of the names he mentions; he does not acknowledge nor attempt to consider their work as intrinsic or even complementary to an understanding of textual politics in

Britain between the wan. Srnall wonder that today most of these 'resuscitated names' are out of print again. Yet their significance must be considered alongside conternporary masculine texts, to observe the differing preoccupations of political cornmitment and permit a more complete understanding of the historical climate.

Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby. Storm Jameson and Stevie Smith could not participate in Siegfried Sassoonfs anaesthetised recollection that "the only way out was the way thr~ugh";~~~women's remembrance of war, and engagement in

264 Cunningham, p. 26 286 Bergona', p. 155. 135 postwar society expressed itself by attempting to draw upon the common social and cultural inhentance of individual women. The fact that they attempted to speak collectively for a society that continued to perceive them as marginalised only makes the courage of their attempt to speak with voices of 'force, dignity and satire' al1 the more remarkable. The case for the 'gospel of detachment', which permits an investigation of the particular nature of women's criticism of the war and postwar society, subtly reveals the discursive quality they brought to the language of reconstruction and resistance. Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Brittain. Vera, Testament of Friendship (1 940: London: Virago Press Ltd, 1980).

-- Testament of Youth (1 933: London: Virago Press Ltd, 1978).

Dowson, Jane (ed.), Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 1996).

Eliot. T. S.. Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).

Graves, Robert, Goodbye To All That (London: Cape, 1929).

Holtby, Winifred, The Crowded Street (London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd, 1924). Letten to a Friend, Holtby, Alice and McWilliam, Jean (eds) (London: Collins, 1937).

---- Mandoa! Mandoa! (New York: Macmillan, 1933).

------Poor Caroline (1 931, London: Virago, 1986).

-- South Riding (1 936, London: The Reprint Company, 1949).

Jameson, (Margaret) Storm, Company Parade (1934: London: Virago Press Ltd-, 1984).

------Journey Frorn The North: The Autobioaraphv of Storm Jameson; Volumes One and Two, (London: Collins and Harville Press, 1969).

----- Love in Winter (1935: London: Virago Press Ltd.,1 984).

--- None Turn Back (London: Cassell, 1936). -- No Time Like The Present (London: CasseIl& Co Ltd. 1933).

Remarque, Erich Mana, AI1 Quiet on the Western Front (1928: New York: Little Brown and Co, 1958).

Silkin, Jon (ed.), The Penauin Book of First World War Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).

Skeiton. Robin (ed.) Poety of the Thirties (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964).

Smith. Helen Zenna, Not So Quiet (1930: London: Virago Press Ltd, 1988).

Time And Tide, London (1920-1939).

Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (1929: London: Harper Collins, 1994).

---- Three Guineas (1938: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1978).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Alberti, Johanna, Bevond Suffraae: Feminists in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).

------"British Feminists and Anti-Fascism in the 1930~"~in Oldfield, Sybil, This Workino-Dav World: Women's Lives and Cultures in Britain 1914-1 945 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994).

-- "The Tum of the Tide: sexuality and politics, 192831", in Women's History Review, Volume 3; No. 2 (1994).

Albinski, Nan Bowman, Women's Uto~ia'sin British and American Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988). Barbera, Jack, and McBrieo, William, Stevie: A Bioaraphy of Stevie Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Beauman, Nicola, A Vew Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 (1983; London: Virago, 1989).

Beddoe, Dierdre, Back To Home and DUW:Women Between the Wars. 1918-1939 (London: Pandora Press, 1989).

Bell, Amy Helen, "British Wornen Poets of the Great War: The Problematics", paper presented in the Dalhousie History Seminar Series, November 8, 1996.

Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes' Twilight: A Studv of the Literature of the Great War (London: Constable, 1965).

Berry, Paul and Bishop, Alan, Testament of a Generation: The Joumalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (London: Virago Press, 1985).

Birkett, Jennifer, "Doubly Detemined: the Ambition of Storm Jarneson", in Jennifer Birkett and Elizabeth Harvey (eds.), Determined Women: Studies in the Construction of the Female Subject, 190-90 (London: Macmillan, 1991).

Bland, Lucy, Banishina the Beast (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995).

Bourke, Joanna, Workina-Class Cultures in Britain 1890 - 1960: Gender. Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994).

Cadogan, Mary, and Craig, Patricia, Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1978).

Ceplair. Larry, Under the Shadow of War: Fascism. Anti-Facism. and Mamists. 1918-1 939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

Clark, Anna, "Gender, Class and the Nation: Franchise Reform in England, 1832- 1928", in James Vernon (ed.), Re-readina the Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). --- "The Return of chartist Dornesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830ç and 1840~"~Journal of British Studies 31 (1992). -- The Struagle for the Breeches (London: Rivers Oram, 1996).

Cook, Chris, and Stevenson, John, Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics, 1929-30 (London: Longman, 1994).

Craig, David. and Egan, Michael, Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War to the Atom Bomb (London: Macmillan, 1979).

Crosland, Margaret, Beyond the Liahthouse: Encjish Wornen Novelists in the Twentieth Century (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1981).

Cunningham, Valentine, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Dickinson, Jennifer El "Women Novelists & War: a Study of the Responses of Seven Women Novelists 191440" (M. Litt. dissertation, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1980).

Eksteins, Modris, Rites of Sprino: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Aae (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989).

Eliot, T. S., "Tradition and the Individual Talent", in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticisrn (London: Methuen and Co., 1920).

Finn, Margot, After Chartism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Finney, Brian, The lnner 1: British Litera Autobioaraphy of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modem Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan, "Tradition and the Female Talent: Modemisrn and Masculinism", in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

Gilbert, Sandra M., "Soldief s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War", in Signs: Journal of Wornen in Culture and Society, vol. 8, no. 3, (1988).

Gorham, Deborah, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (Oxford: Blackwell Publishen Ltd, 1996).

Hams, Jose, Ptivate Lives. Public Spirit: Britain 1870 - 1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Ltd., 1994).

Handley-Taylor, Geoffrey, Winifred Holtby: A Concise and Selected Bibliooraphy . (London: A. Brown and Sons, 1955).

Heinemann, Margot, "Left Review, New Writing, and the Broad Alliance Against Fascism", in Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Eds.), Visions and Blueprints: Avant-oarde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth Century Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)

Higonnet, Margaret R, et. al. (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

Hynes, Samuel, A War Irnaoined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1990).

Jeffreys, Sheila, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Ferninism and Sexuality 1880 - 1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985).

Joannou, Maroula, 'Ladies. Please Don? Smash These Windows: Women's Writino. Feminist Consciousness and Social Chanae 1918 - 38 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995). Kent, Susan Kingsley, Makina Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in lntewar Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

------"The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism". Journal of British Studies. xxix (1988).

Sex and Suffraae in Britain 1860 - 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

Lassner, Phyllis, "A Cry for Life: Storm Jameson, Stevie Smith, and the Fate of Europe's Jews", in Paul M. Holsinger and Mary Anne Schofield (eds), Visions of War: World War Two in Popular Literature and Culture (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992).

Layton, Lynne, "Vera Britain's Testament(s)", in Margaret Higonnet et. al (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

Lawrence, Marsaret, The School of Femininitv (1936; Toronto: Musson Book Co., 1972).

Lewis, Jane, "ln Search of Real Equality: Women Between the Wan", in Glovenmith, Frank (ed.), Class. Culture and Social Chanoe (Brighton: Brighton University Press, 1980).

Women in Enaland. 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

Light, Alison, Forever Enoland: Femininitv. Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).

Melman. Billie, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappen and Nymphç (London: Macmillan, 1988). Oates, Joyce Carol, "A Child With a Cold, Cold Eye", New York Times Book Review, 3 October, 1982.

Ouditt, Sharon, Fiahtina Forces. Writino Women: ldentity and ldeology in the Firs World War (London: Routledge, 1994).

Pedenon, Susan, Familv, Dependence. and the Oricjns of the Welfare State: Britain and France. 1914-1 945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993).

Riley, Denise, 'Am I That Name?': Feminism and the Cateaory of "Women" in History (Minneapolis: University of Michigan, 1988).

Scott, Joan, "Rewriting Histoiy". in Margaret Higonnet et. al (eds), Behind the

Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). ,

Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchv: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990).

Spalding. Frances, British Art Since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).

------Stevie Smith: A Critical Bioaraphy (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

Spender, Dale, Time And Tide Wait For No Man (London: Pandora Press, 1984).

Sternlicht Sanford. Stevie Smith: Twayne's English Authors Series Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990).

Sumrnefield, Penny, "Women and War in the Twentieth Century", in June Purvis (ed), Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945 (New York St. Martin's Press, 1995).

Tylee, Claire, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writina 1914 - 1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, IWO). Walkovitz, Judith, City of Dreadfid ~eiiaht(Chicago: Univenity of Chicago Press, 1992).

Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mouming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Wohl, Robert, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

Wolff, Janet, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Gender and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). lMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (QA-3)

APPLIED - IMAGE . lnc 1-. 1653 East Main Street ,, ,, -.- Rochester. NY 14609 USA =-= =-= Phone: 716/48%û3ûO --=-- Fax: 7161288-5989