Mid-century women's writing

Disrupting the public/private divide

Melissa Dinsman, Megan Faragher, Ravenel Richardson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781526169778
• eBook ISBN: 9781526169761
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The traditional narrative of the mid-century (1930s-60s) is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. Mid-century women's writing: Disrupting the public/private divide aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: politicizing the domestic and domesticizing politics
• Part I: Professionalizing the domestic
• Introduction to Part I
• 1 Professional identity and personal space in Mary Renault’s Kind Are Her Answers and Return to Night
• 2 Talking shop: Celia Fremlin and invisible work
• 3 ‘Some thoroughly tiresome housekeeping crisis’: Rebecca West’s wartime journalism
• 4 ‘Coldly kind’: calculated care in post-war British women’s writing
• Part II: Nationalizing gender politics
• Introduction to Part II
• 5 New world women and the Labour Party win in Marghanita Laski’s The Village
• 6 Beyond ‘companionate marriage’: Elizabeth Taylor’s gendered critique of post-war consensus in A View of the Harbour and A Wreath of Roses
• 7 Dissident friendship and revolutionary love in the novels of Sabitri Roy and Sulekha Sanyal
• 8 ‘The political theory of heaven’: religious nationalism, mystical anarchism, and the Spanish Civil War in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s After the Death of Don Juan
• Part III: Women beyond the nation
• Introduction to Part III
• 9 ‘A woman is always a woman!’: British women writers and refugees
• 10 Families in a time of catastrophe: Anna Gmeyner’s Manja, 1920–33
• 11 ‘Some other land, some other sea’: Attia Hosain’s fiction and non-fiction in Distant Traveller
• Bibliography
• Index