From her birth in Whitby in 1891, to her death in Cambridge in
1986, Margaret Storm Jameson's life and writing spanned the greater
part of the twentieth century. She was, in every sense, a woman of
her time, speaking to the long series of generations she lived
through of their collective present, past and future. Out of her
own life-history she created a mirror reflecting the long
twentieth-century transformation of Europe. This collection of
essays, the first volume to be devoted entirely to Jameson, brings
together a distinguished group of academics to analyse the
impressive range and variety of her work. Their studies follow the
chronology of her career from the 1920s to the 1960s. They review
the different modes in which she wrote (fiction, journalism,
autobiography), and show how effectively her writing engages with
the contested issues of the period (socialism, fascism, pacifism,
exile, communism, colonialism) and with key historical events (the
First World War, the General Strike, the Munich Pact, the Second
World War, the Cold War). They place her writing in relation to
other writers of the day, both her English connections and her
European models, in order to underline its relevance, recover
forgotten networks of activism and collaboration, and restore
Jameson to the pivotal role she played during her lifetime. In the
process, the conventional categorisations of twentieth-century
writing come under pressure: reviewing Jameson's links with early
modernist journals, and highlighting overlooked connections between
British and Continental modernisms, these essays help redefine the
field of modernist studies. The collection closes with a sequence
of unpublished letters from Jameson to the feminist, historian, and
social activist Hilary Newitt Brown, a lively, first-hand account
of literary, political and everyday life in England during the
Second World War.Jameson was first and foremost a stylist, whose
work on the relations of aesthetics and politics challenges
simplistic critical divides between modernism and documentary
realism. She was a key activist in politics and cultural politics,
and an analyst of feeling, and the part it plays in both politics
and everyday life. Last but not least, she was a chronicler of
public life, and of the collective experience of England and Europe
in the twentieth century. This volume proposes a re-assessment of
Jameson's overall significance in the writerly landscape of her
time; in the process, it suggests perspectives in which that
landscape is itself ripe for revision."For someone who published so
many novels, among them ones of real distinction, Storm Jameson was
unusually prone to self doubt. `Its singular badness proves that I
was not a born novelist', she remarked of her early and very
interesting novel, The Pot Boils (1919), and in her autobiography,
Journey From the North, she more than once suggests that her chosen
career was a mistake, or at all events led to no great achievement.
That she rarely made much money from her novels is true. Yet as
every page of the autobiography shows, and as a cache of letters
included in the present book further reveals, Jameson was a born
writer. These letters, which have never before been published and
which perhaps provide the book's high point, were written over a
period of some fifty years to her close friends, Hilary Newitt
Brown and Harrison Brown, an English couple who, foreseeing the
coming of the Second World War, in 1937 settled in British Columbia
and to whom Jameson could talk with unabashed candour - for
example, of her fearful loathing of Hitler and fascism, of her
contempt for most politicians, and of her sense of outrage at the
pusillanimity, backsliding and ill faith of officialdom in wavering
about whether to grant refugee status to writers and intellectuals
she was trying to get out of continental Europe before the Nazis
got to them. Jameson was deeply involved in P.E.N., whose English
president she became in 1939, but this alone won't account for her
hard work on behalf of other writers. These letters are vivid
testimony of the tensions, fears and difficulties of the times,
both before, during and after the war. But what makes them so
appealing is Jameson's often excoriating wit. Of Chamberlain's
relationship with the French government in 1938, she remarks: `it
isn't true C let the French down. He didn't have to this time. They
were taking the lift down so fast he had to run to get into it'
(p.185). And, in 1940, with Britain under siege, she notes, `I
don't know where the Munich spirit is, I mean, what stone it has
crawled under. No doubt you could lift a stone or two and find
things come crawling out. I know where one or two such stones lie.
But the ordinary people are fine' (p.193).The essays that make up
Writing in Dialogue rightly consider some of the ways in which
Jameson finds fictional form in which to explore her awareness that
the worth of `ordinary people' is threatened by forces that they
must try to control or be controlled and oppressed by. Her writing
career more or less coincides with what Eric Hobsbawm has called
`The Age of Extremes' - that is, 1913-1989 - and her novels try to
account for the age's dark, violent forces, and at the same time,
and despite a period as a pacifist and although she was a committed
socialist, try not to buy into any of what Orwell, with pugnacious
relish, called `the smelly little orthodoxies that contend daily
for our souls.'As the editors remark in their Introduction,
`Jameson has suffered from the tendency in feminist scholarship to
focus solely on female writing for its representation of women's
lives and to ignore their political work except in terms of their
feminism' (p. 3). In this context, it is notable that Rosamond
Lehmann is quoted as finding Jameson's `Munich' novel, Europe to
Let, `electrifying and ferocious', and motivated by a `a passionate
disgust and indignation combined with a masculine intelligence.'
I'm surprised that Kate McLoughlin, who quotes this in her
interesting essay, `Voices and Values: Storm Jameson's Europe to
Let and the Munich Pact', doesn't consider the implications of that
phrase `masculine intelligence'; but other essays engage with the
formal consequences of Jameson's determination to produce novels of
ideas. Hence, Briganti's `Mirroring the Darkness: Storm Jameson and
the Collective Novel' - though in any discussion of the trilogy
Mirror in Darkness (1934-36) I would have thought it worthwhile to
consider Dos Passos's 1920s U.S.A. trilogy, given the impact it
made overseas as well as in America, and in view of its author's
professed communist sympathies. Hence, too, Sharon Ouditt's
valuable essay on the `Men, Women and World War I in the Fiction of
Storm Jameson' - though, if, as Ouditt shows, Jameson had to
overcome the prejudice against women being non-combatants and thus
`at best peripheral to war' (p. 57), I don't see why Arnold
Bennett's The Pretty Lady (1918) shouldn't come into the reckoning,
given that Bennett was also a non-combatant and yet for my money
produced one of the very best novels to emerge from that period,
one that deals quite brilliantly with the effects of war on the
home front. Hence, too, Jennifer Birkett's insistence that Jameson
looked to writers outside England for her peers. In her pages on
`The Shape of Evil: Before the Crossing and The Black Laurel', and
especially in her telling remark on Jameson's `self-flagellating
insight into the necessary cruelty of authorial vision' (p. 130),
Birkett as good as buries Angus Wilson's contention in The Wild
Garden (1963) that English novelists have been unable to write
about evil. Given Dickens's novels, this was anyway a fairly daft
claim. But Wilson's intention was to rebuke English readers not so
much for a complacent humanism as for their indifference to those
novels of ideas he associated with continental Europe. As a
corrective to such indifference he could have looked closer to
home. He could and indeed should have looked to Jameson. And as
someone who himself could be properly satiric about the pretensions
and venality of the literary life, Wilson should have been much
taken by Jameson's 1962 novel, The Road From the Monument, a most
subtle dissection of male vanity, egoism, and self-deception.This
late novel isn't discussed in Writing in Dialogue. Nor are quite a
few others. I grant that not all are important. Others however are,
and it would have been good to see them at least mentioned. (The
so-called comedies are for the most part ignored.) Still, you can't
have everything and Writing in Dialogue gives us a good deal. The
essays are consistently interesting, readable, informative, and
without an air of special pleading. With their publication we can
reasonably hope that the reputation of this important novelist is
now on the mend."-John Lucas, Key Words, A journal of Cultural
Materialism - Nottingham Trent University
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