Against a background of enormous cultural change during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writing by British Jewish women
grappled with shifting meanings of Jewish identity, the pressure of
social norms, and questions of assimilation. Until recently,
however, the distinctive experiences and perspectives of Jewish
women have been absent from accounts of both British Jewish
literature and women's writing in Britain. Drawing on new research
in Jewish studies, postcolonial criticism, trauma theory and
cultural geography, contributors in Jewish Women Writers in Britain
examine the ways that these women writers interpreted the
experience of living between worlds and imaginatively transformed
it for a wide general readership. Editor Nadia Valman brings
together contributors to consider writers whose Jewish identity was
central to their practice as well as those whose relationship to
their Jewish heritage was oblique, complicated, or mobile and
figured in their work in varied and often unexpected ways. The
chapters cover a range of genres including didactic fiction,
devotional writing, modernist poetry, autobiographical fiction, the
postmodern novel, memoir, and public poetry. Among the writers
discussed are Grace Aguilar, Celia and Marion Moss, Katie Magnus,
Lily Montagu, Amy Levy, Nina Salaman, Mina Loy, Betty Miller, Eva
Figes, Ruth Fainlight, Elaine Feinstein, Anita Brookner, Julia
Pascal, Diane Samuels, Jenny Diski, Linda Grant, and Sue Hubbard.
Expanding the concerns of Jewish literature beyond existing
male-centered narratives of the heroic conflict between family
expectations and personal aspirations, women writers also produced
fiction and poetry exploring the female body, maternity, sexual
politics, and the transmission of memory. While some sought to
appropriate traditional Jewish literary forms, others used formal
and stylistic experimentation to challenge a religious
establishment and social conventions that constrained women's
public freedoms. The extraordinary range of responses to Jewish
culture and history in the work of these writers will interest
literary scholars and readers interested in Jewish women's history.
Contributors Include: Cynthia Scheinberg, Rachel Potter, Sarah
Sceats, Sue Vice, Peter Lawson, Louise Sylvester, Phyllis Lassner,
David Brauner, Nadia Valman, Lucy Wright, Cheryl Verdon.
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