This thought-provoking study offers a radically new perspective on the literature of the interwar period. Writing from a feminist-materialist perspective, the author examines novels of sensibility, domestic fictions, lesbian writing, autobiography, speculative fiction and anti-fascist writing by Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Radclyffe Hall and many others. Maroula Joannou provides an incisive, scholarly and accessible feminist critique of the masculinist assumptions about literature of the 1920s and 1930s which have passed without adequate critical scrutiny.
Selected for the CHOICE list of Outstanding Academic Books for 1995 (Choice current reviews for Academic Libraries)

This is the first critical study of Clara Dorothea Rackham nee Tabor (1875-1966), a towering figure in the suffrage, labour, co-operative, peace, and adult education movements but virtually forgotten today. This clearly written and engaging study is based on unpublished primary sources including Rackham's unpublished speeches, letters, diaries, and contemporary media coverage of her work in local and national archives. It reassesses this remarkable woman not only as a politician who changed the face of Cambridge, the university city in which she lived and worked, but also as a public intellectual whose feminist advocacy of a fair, just, and equal society helped pave the way to Britain's postwar settlement and Welfare State. Rackham came to prominence as Chairman of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, as a government factory inspector, and championing the rights of unemployed women in the 1930s. An early broadcaster on BBC radio, and among the first women appointed magistrates and councillors, her name became synonymous with enlightened local government. The transformation of women's lives in Victorian and twentieth-century Britain is crucial to understanding Rackham's ideals, intellectual formation, and priorities as a Labour Party politician. This book will be of interest to historians and students of gender, history, and women's lives.

Available in paperback for the first time, this important collection of essays presents the best of feminist scholarship on the suffrage movement, illustrating its complexity, richness and diversity. Combining historical reappraisal with lively accounts of the culture of the women's suffrage movement, this volume offers a unique focus. It includes studies of the fascinating, but neglected groups that participated in the campaign: the Women's Franchise League; the Women's Freedom League; the Women's Tax Resistance League and the United Suffragists. This is accompanied by feminist research on the poetry, fiction and drama that emerged from women's struggle for the vote. In addition there are reappraisals of two leading figures in the Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union, an illuminating analysis of the relationship between suffrage and sexuality, and a discussion of what happened away from the metropolis, as well as of the little known campaign to extend the vote after 1918.

This thought-provoking study offers a radically new perspective on the literature of the interwar period. Writing from a feminist-materialist perspective, the author examines novels of sensibility, domestic fictions, lesbian writing, autobiography, speculative fiction and anti-fascist writing by Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Radclyffe Hall and many others. Maroula Joannou provides an incisive, scholarly and accessible feminist critique of the masculinist assumptions about literature of the 1920s and 1930s which have passed without adequate critical scrutiny.
Selected for the CHOICE list of Outstanding Academic Books for 1995 (Choice current reviews for Academic Libraries)