mary Joannou

The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of the churches and trade unions to environmentalists, feminists, students, anti-nuclear campaigners, peace activists and inner city radicals. The strike was sustained by an extensive network of miners’ support groups working closely with the mining communities. This chapter analysis the composition, methods and effectiveness of the groups which raised prodigious amounts of money. By emphasising their gender and sexuality, Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners presented a substantive challenge to the chauvinistic attitudes of the coalfields. Working-class women’s activism drew upon equal rights traditions established in the mining areas between the wars. The support demonstrated by some trade unions and individual trade unionists is contrasted to the equivocation of the TUC and the support offered by the Communist Party (despite its internal divisions) and by many Labour authorities, councillors and constituency Labour Parties which contrasted with the position taken by Neil Kinnock as Labour Party leader.

In 1937 two young women both aged under 20 were living within miles of each other in the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia. Neither was aware of the other’s existence. It was not until the 1950s that they were to meet in London. Doris Lessing was even then struggling to come to terms with the racism and stifling provincialism of her upbringing. As Marina, a character in her story ‘A Home for the Highland Cattle’, puts it, ‘what is a British Colony but a sort of highly-flavoured suburb to England itself?’1 The one had recently left her girls’ school in Edinburgh and gone to Africa to embark on a disastrously ill-matched marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark. The other was the daughter of conservative first-generation English settlers and had been brought up on an isolated farm on the veldt.

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) and Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian (1946) are all strongly influenced by Jane Austen and were published at a historical moment in which Austen’s place in the national imaginary was being reinvented. The links between Austen, Englishness and the authors who turned to her for tutelage are worth pursuing. Born in 1896, 1912 and 1913 respectively, Smith, Taylor and Pym participated in the modernist reaction against the old-fashioned sobriety and earnestness that the Victorians had come to represent to their generation of writers; they had also lived through the momentous changes in gender relations of the early twentieth century and were acutely conscious of their newly won freedoms as modern women. The appeal of Pride and Prejudice, the text to which these modern reworkers of Austen most frequently turn, lay in Austen’s technique of centring her novels on the consciousness of spirited, assertive women: these writers recognized Austen as an accomplished arbiter of women’s choices, sensibility and reasoning, and saw Elizabeth Bennet as the champion par excellence of individual desire. As Mary Poovey puts it, it is in Pride and Prejudice that the ‘challenge that feeling and imaginative energy offer to moral authority is particularly persistent and problematic, for it is posed by the heroine herself’.1

The British Empire, and particularly India with which Britain had a close and long relationship, and which reached its zenith when Queen Victoria assumed the title Empress of India in 1877, was a major component in the English people’s sense of their own cultural identity.1 Despite the domestic reformulations of Englishness in this period, much of the power, buoyancy and confidence which still attached to Englishness both at home and abroad was dependent on the presence of the colonies. There is, however, no consensus about the effect on the English psyche of the relinquishing of empire about which there are a variety of possible historical interpretations from minimal at one extreme to catastrophic at the other.2 As Simon Featherstone puts it: ‘The sense of Englishness as an identity penetrated and destabilised by the consequences of empire had been active since the late nineteenth century. However, it took the dissolution of that empire to demonstrate the range of challenges that imperialism brought.’3

Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 is primarily a work of literary history which provides a scholarly account of women’s writing during the 1940s and the 1950s, making some attempt to contribute to wider debates and cultural narratives. The book offers an alternative to the usual period demarcations of twentieth-century literary history which take 1945 as a watershed in addressing the writing of the 1950s in tandem with the 1940s: a time-span that makes it possible to look closely at the ramifications of the war which were felt by women long afterwards. I use a synthesis of historical retrieval, literary theory and textual analysis to provide culturally situated and historically specific readings of a wide range of texts addressing issues that relate to the changing experience of women at this time. Examples are the displacements of war, women’s radically altered understandings of their own sexuality, the retreat from empire, the relationship of women to the idea of nation, the migrant experience, the literary representation of Welsh, Scottish and English identity, and the meanings of home.

The figure of the Englishwoman was of symbolic and cultural significance in historical novels by women such as Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek (1941), Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber (1944) and Magdalen King-Hall’s The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1944). I suggest that these romantic historical novels and others like them are effectively safely distanced displaced accounts of women’s emotional responses to the home front and that they provided women with vicarious romantic experience in contrast to the austerity and gloom that followed the Second World War. Thus historical novels offered them a means of keeping alive the recently acquired sense of adventure and freedom (including for many the enjoyment of extramarital affairs in the absence of their husbands) for which there were no longer the opportunities after men returned to the jobs in the workplace that they had vacated temporarily and women to their traditional roles in the home from 1945 onwards.

Virginia Woolf’s relationship to her identity as an English woman was complicated and ambivalent. Her great pacifist polemic, Three Guineas (1938), epitomized her conviction that a woman’s relationship to her nationality was compromised by discriminatory laws. Three Guineas contains her celebrated declamation that English women were ‘stepdaugh-ters, not full daughters of England’1 because women were required to change their nationality on marriage to a foreigner: ‘A woman, whether or not she helped to beat the Germans, becomes a German if she marries a German.’2 Yet even in Three Guineas Woolf stopped significantly short of the disavowal of all patriotic feeling by recognizing that the human heart had its reasons that reason knew not: And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.3 The start of the Second World War focused Woolf’s attention on those aspects of England that she cherished, especially the City of London with its rich literary associations and the beauty of the English countryside.

Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals reintroduces the work of writers and activists whose texts, and often whose very lives, were passionately engaged in the major political issues of their times but who have been displaced from both the historical and the literary record. Focusing on seventeen writers whose common concern was radically to change the status quo, this collection of thirteen essays challenges not only the neglect of these particular writers but also the marginalization of women from British political life and literary history. This volume's recuperation of them alters our appraisal of their literary period and defines their influence on struggles still very much alive today--including the suffrage movement, feminism, anti-vivisection, reproductive rights, trade unionism, pacifism, and socialism. The radicals of 1889-1939, whether or not widely read in their own day, speak in different ways to the 'intelligent discontent' of many people in our time.

... Thus the history of the popular woman's novel from the second half of the twentieth century, and of such authors as Barbara Taylor Bradford or Danielle Steele, is a hidden history of reading that countless women have enjoyed but that women who think of ... Alice Ridout. ...

This volume of new writings has a double purpose: to question Auden's description of the 1930s as a 'low dishonest decade' and to draw attention to the richness, complexity and diversity of women's writing of the period and how this deals with issues of politics, gender and history. The writers discussed include Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Burdekin, Nancy Cunard, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf.

This essay discusses the cultural work performed by dress in Wide Sargasso Sea which is largely to situate the white creole woman within European racial hierarchies. Drawing on both fashion theory (Alison Bancroft’s work on Fashion and Psychoanalysis [2012]) and postcolonial theorists (Mary Lou Emery and others), I show how Rhys retains and develops her earlier interest in clothing as an indicator of women’s subjectivity, visceral longings, day dreams and fantasies, and how dress articulates the protagonist Antoinette’s contradictory desires. Furthermore, dress carries the freight of Rhys’s concern with racial hierarchy, with the relationship between the colonizer and colonized, and is accentuated as a marker of Caribbean identity. The chapter focuses on the importance of Antoinette’s red dress which is used to interrogate and refuse English cultural norms.

Reviews of Martin Pugh monograph 'The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women's Suffrage, 1866–1914' and Patricia Greenwood's 'Connecting Links: The British and American Suffrage Movements, 1900–1914'

I t is pleasing to see two books that add new pieces to the mosaic from which we derive our knowledge of the women’s suffrage movement. We know much more about Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) than we once did. But there are still conspicuous gaps in the picture. There is no published monograph on the history of the Women’s Freedom League or any scholarly monograph on important figures in the British movement, including the WSPU’s Annie Kenney. The impact of other suffragist campaigns on the movement in Britain needs more analysis, although good work exists on the contribution of suffragists from New Zealand to the British campaign. Patricia Greenwood Harrison admirably fills a vital gap in the international dimensions of the suffrage movement, analyzing the personal and organizational links between British and U.S. suffragists between 1900 and 1914 and arguing that these links occurred on a much bigger scale than has been recognized: at no other period did British and U.S. women work so closely on a single, focused issue and objective. The year 1909

The films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are quintessentially English and crucial to our understanding of how an English national cinema was constructed in the 1940s. Yet they are also visually striking; European and cosmopolitan, their dramatic, disorientating style and camerawork reflecting the influence of German expressionism making them the antithesis of popular realist, wartime films including The Bells Go Down (1943) or This Happy Breed (1944) with which the golden age of British cinema is associated. Films such as Millions Like Us (1943), In Which We Serve (1942), Waterloo Road (1944), and Went the Day Well? (1942) represented the first serious attempt to establish a quality national cinema in Britain and to combat the domination of the international film industry by the United States, through engaging with English topics and subject matter with a fidelity and 'inside' knowledge that Hollywood could not emulate. Powell and Pressburger ('so fluent and prodigal of style, so moodily inept in story') deliberately eschewed the realist aesthetic of most contemporary filmmakers adopting startlingly modernist techniques which critics often decried.' But as Marcia Landy has observed, 'the effect of validating documentary realism as the ultimate test of a text's social and aesthetic efficiency was to denigrate those texts that appeared blatantly stylized and ar t i f i~ia l ' .~ Working, as Ian Christie has put it, 'without the benefit of

When Elizabeth Robins died in 1952 her obituary in the Manchester Guardian described her as the "last of that little phalanx which let Ibsen loose on the English stage ... with the most shattering results." (1) Robins came to be remembered by the theatergoing public for her pioneering performances of Ibsen, to whom she introduced audiences for the first time, after moving to England from the United States in 1888. Robins's first big Ibsen part was as Mrs. Linden in a matinee of A Doll's House, in January 1891. She then staged the first English production of Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville Theatre in April to May 1891 in collaboration with the young Philadelphian actor Marion Lea. Robins, who had worked with William Archer on the translation from the Norwegian, took the leading role. Archer was impressed with her acclaimed performance as Hedda and called the production the "finest piece of modern tragedy within my recollection." (2) Robins secured another personal triumph as Hilda Wangel in the first English production of The Master Builder (1893-94), which she co-produced with the actor Herbert Waring at the Trafalgar Square Theatre. Her other successes in the West End of London were as Martha Bernick in The Pillars of Society (1889), Rebecca West in Rosmersholm (1893), and Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman (1896-97). After she had acted in a series of Ibsen plays at Ellen Terry's Opera Comique, financed by private subscription in May-June 1893 and jointly managed with Marion Lea, Oscar Wilde wrote to Robins styling himself "one of her warmest admirers" and made a guinea subscription toward the silver tea service that was presented to her by appreciative audiences: she "deserves an offering indeed: a very imaginative artist. The English stage is in her debt." (3) Acting the parts of Ibsen's spirited protagonists politicized Elizabeth Robins and had a profoundly ratiocinative impact on her consciousness. As John Stokes puts it, "Ibsen's consistently dominating heroines offered these actresses images of themselves which intensified their sense of personal involvement." (4) Like other sexual and political radicals such as Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx (one of Ibsen's translators), and Havelock Ellis, all drawn to the radical individualism and self-actualization with which Ibsen's drama became synonymous, Robins regarded Ibsen as a standard bearer for her own dreams of a future in which equality between the sexes would be achieved. Late Victorian and Edwardian society came to associate Ibsen's work with progressive attitudes to contemporary sexual and social issues (divorce, the marriage laws, the "double standard" women's desire for autonomy, etc.) ventilated in the natural-sounding dialogue in the plays of his middle period. Ghosts (1881) did much to consolidate his reputation as a courageous taboo-breaking dramatist. The play intimates the tragic consequence of venereal disease for women and children and was privately performed in London on a subscription-only basis to the Independent Theatre Society at the Royal Theatre in March 1891, in order to avoid censorship from the Lord Chamberlains office. The "Ibsenism" that Robins espoused represented both a challenge to moral convention and a repudiation of the idea of womanly duty, disturbing some of the most firmly rooted assumptions of late Victorian Britain and dividing literary and theatrical circles into impassioned detractors and defenders of his work. While the Ibsenite "gospel was to a large extent preached by women," (5) Ibsen's own relationship to the reform movements and to the Norwegian Women's Rights League in his own country was complicated. As loan Templeton suggests, Ibsen's much-quoted disavowal of feminist appropriations of The Doll's House reflects his desire to prevent himself and his work from being co-opted by any cause or persons and is not a "precise reference to the dramatist's purpose in writing A Doll's House twenty years earlier. …

The politics of modernism, David Forgacs safest in storms - George Wither in the 1650s, David Norbrook "authority" in Calvinism - the spirit betwixt scripture andpolity, Robert Weimann the ass with double vision - politicising an Ancient Greek novel, Edith Hall Unity Theatre, Colin Chambers communities - British Theatre in the 1980s, Peter Holland closet Keynesians - dissidence and theatre, Alan Sinfield liberty outside the law, Christopher Hill love of England - patriotism and the making of Victorianism, John Lucas clash, Maroula Joannou Massinger, mourner of an unborn past, Victor Kiernan Marvel, Milton and Trajan's column, Elsie Duncan-Jones sexuality and intertextuality in Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, Inga-Stine Ewbank the end of socialist realism, Andy Croft.

EMILY Hilda Young, the subject of Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei’s fascinating study, lived for over twenty years in a well-disguised domestic ménage a trois , masquerading successfully as the respectable widowed housekeeper of the love of her life, the married headmaster of a well-known boy’s school. Young was the author of thirteen largely forgotten novels, many set in Bristol, which, Briganti and Mezei argue, evoke, albeit obliquely, the emotional turbulence and sexual dissidence that often lay below the surface of the lives of many outwardly conformist middle-class women in the inter-war period who were driven to lead double lives. When not engaged in writing or household management, Young loved nothing better than one of the least feminine and most dangerous of country pursuits, rock climbing, at which she became an expert. This ‘subversiveness’, or surprising attraction to the unconventional, recognised before by John Bayley and Sally Beauman in their introductions to the Virago reprints of eight of Young’s novels, is what, according to the authors of this book, makes Young worthy of critical attention and links her to other novelists concerned with domestic modernism, such as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Lettice Cooper, F. M. Mayor and E. M. Delafield. Briganti and Mezei have scoured the deposit libraries for lost fiction and this impressively lucid and well-researched book belongs within a tradition of feminist recovery of early twentieth-century non-canonical women’s writing associated, in its early phases, with studies such as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Our Own (1979) or Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession (1984). The impressive number of forgotten novels by inter-war writers that Briganti and Mezei unearth demonstrates how incomplete that project of recovery still is. However, Domestic Modernism goes far beyond the sort of ‘safe’ woman-authored and woman-centred domestic novel whose reclamation has made possible the commercial success of the publishing house Persephone Books, which specialises in this kind of reprint. Both Mezei and Briganti have been active in recent interdisciplinary initiatives, in which social Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E. H. Young , Ashgate, 2006, £45 hbk. R E V I E W .......................................................................................................