Shows how ideas of nation identity were bound up with notions of femininity and private life during the period between the wars. Alison Light looks at a range of writers from Ivy Compton-Burnett and Daphne du Maurier to Agatha Christie.

Most studies of the interwar years have focused on literary elites, rendering the era and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of the English character in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognize the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars.
From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, "Forever England" traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernizing in outlook. In a series of literary analyses, Light defines this new version of "Englishness"; in particular, she looks at new kinds of readership and fiction, at the historical and emotional significance of the "whodunit," the burgeoning of historical romance, and the creation of a middlebrow culture.
As a feminist inquiry, "Forever England" argues fora social and political history that connects the interior structures of private life with their more public and national forms. It also makes the controversial proposal that feminism should come to terms with conservative, as well as radical, desires and their place in women's lives.
Scholarly and passionate, "Forever England" will appeal to those interested in the boundaries between literature and history and their different forms of story-telling, as well as the changing shapes of national and sexual identities.

A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work Provides a historicising collection of essays, by a major critic, exemplifying and opening up feminist cultural politics to new readers Offers a way into a variety of texts and genres including popular fiction, drama, film - as well as single authors, united by a lively and readable feminist approach Extends current thinking on national identity and Englishness from a writer who helped open these fields Speaks to the new and growing academic interest in 'life-writing' Includes shorter pieces which also encapsulate complex arguments as well as examples of original life-writing by the author Includes an autobiographical introduction which contextualises and historicises the author's work and reflects on it Alison Light Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.

Alison Light - Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.

A luminous sequel to the highly acclaimed first volume of Theatres of Memory, Island Stories is an engrossing journey of discovery into the multiple meanings of national myths, their anchorage in daily life and their common sense of a people's destiny. Raphael Samuel reveals the palimpsest of British national histories, offering a searching yet affectionate account of the heroes and villains, legends and foibles, cherished by the "four nations" that inhabit the British Isles. Samuel is interested by the fact that traditions can disappear no less abruptly than they were invented. How is it, he asks, that the Scots have lost interest in a British narrative of which they were once a central protagonist? Why is the celebration of "Britons" thriving today just as its object has become problematic? Island Stories marvelously conveys the mutability of national conceits. Samuel calls as witness a galaxy of authorities-Bede and Gerald of Barri, Macaulay and Stubbs, Shakespeare and Dickens, Lord Reith and Raymond Williams, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn-each of whom sought to renew the sense of national identity by means of an acute sense of the past. Island Stories is a luminous study of the way nations use their past to lend meaning to the present and future. This sequel to the widely acclaimed Theatres of Memory is as passionate, unexpected and enjoyable as its predecessor.

WINNER OF THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 'The greatest memoirs offer all the complex shades and colours that we expect in fiction. A Radical Romance is more than just some summing-up: it is a work of art' Guardian Alison Light met the charismatic social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead. Theirs was an attraction of opposites - he, twenty years her senior, from a Jewish Communist family with its roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, she from the English working class. In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. A Radical Romance is a luminous account of love and loss, and a celebration of our transformative capacity to share our lives and change our selves. 'Displays her usual sharp but sympathetic appreciation of the finest gradations of culture and class' Margaret Drabble, TLS, Books of the Year 'She writes with precision and tenderness about loss. A Radical Romance is an admirable tribute to a man, a period of rapid change in London, and an unusual marriage' Stephanie Merritt, Observer 'Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light' Claire Tomalin

"Superbly researched, often passionately eloquent, and enthralling throughout."--"Washington Post Book World

"When Virginia Woolf wrote "A Room of One's Own "in 1929, she established her reputation as a feminist, and an advocate for unheard voices. But like thousands of other upper-class British women, Woolf relied on live-in domestic servants for the most intimate of daily tasks. That room of Woolf's own was kept clean by a series of cooks and maids throughout her life. In the much-praised "Mrs. Woolf and the Servants," Alison Light probes the unspoken inequality of Bloomsbury homes with insight and grace, and provides an entirely new perspective on an essential modern artist.

"Family history begins with missing persons," Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring. Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a ne'er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than we'd hoped. That didn't stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her father's life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is a clear-eyed, fascinating, frequently moving account of the lives of everyday people, of the tough decisions and hard work, the good luck and bad breaks, that chart the course of a life. Light's forebears--servants, sailors, farm workers--were among the poorest, traveling the country looking for work; they left few lasting marks on the world. But through her painstaking work in archives, and her ability to make the people and struggles of the past come alive, Light reminds us that "every life, even glimpsed through the chinks of the census, has its surprises and secrets." What she did for the servants of Bloomsbury in her celebrated Mrs. Woolf and the Servants Light does here for her own ancestors, and, by extension, everyone's: draws their experiences from the shadows of the past and helps us understand their lives, estranged from us by time yet inextricably interwoven with our own. Family history, in her hands, becomes a new kind of public history.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize 'Part detective story, part Dickensian saga, part labour history. A thrilling and unnerving read' Observer 'Mesmeric and deeply moving' Daily Telegraph 'Remarkable, haunting, full of wisdom' The Times Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.