From her childhood in Whitby to her long old age in Cambridge, the
life of Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), novelist,
autobiographer, and political activist, spanned almost the whole of
the twentieth century. A self-styled Little Englander by nature,
and European by nurture, equally at home, or out of place, in the
North Yorkshire moors and seascape of her birth, metropolitan
London, rural France, and the capitals of Central Europe, she wrote
of country, cities and the exile from both with equal knowledge and
sympathy. Out of the changing landscapes of her present, she
fashioned her vision of the future. The title of her autobiography,
Journey from the North, is a simultaneous evocation and erasure of
nostalgia for lost commonality, and in her long life as writer and
activist, President of wartime PEN (the association of Poets,
Essayist, Novelists) committed to the values of freedom and social
justice, she fought to reconcile the conflicting forms of emergent
modernity. Her own journey is the generic experience of
twentieth-century Britain, and the England she urges on her
contemporaries is one that shares the life and mind of Europe. The
present book traces the history of that shared experience. It
recovers, through her writing, the aspirations and the
disappointments of the generation of socialists that was Class
1914. The soldiers returning from the front in 1918, to
unemployment and the General Strike of 1926, fight in 1940
alongside Frenchmen, and against Germans, who are victims of the
same system: class conflict, nationalist rivalries, imperialist
ambition, all for Jameson have the same defining economic horizon.
At the end of the odyssey the stark alternatives take shape:
Washington or Moscow, the madness of American capitalism, or the
oppression of Stalinist Communism.
Alongside the narrative of Jameson's life, and the experiences as
daughter, wife, and mother that shaped her personality and her
career, the book explores her concern with issues of culture and
society, cultural memory, and cultural landscapes, her fascination
with aesthetic form and the relation of writing to politics, her
insight into the materiality of words, and her persistent probing
of the nature of the writing subject. It draws on unpublished
archive material and brings new research on neglected areas of
cultural history into conjunction with literary-critical analyses
of Jameson's novels and studies of her journalism and essays. There
is an extensive Bibliography of her work.
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