Abstract
This article examines women writers as characters in British novels and stories by women writers from the 1940s to the early 1960s. In works by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Renault, and others, there is a reflection on the social and artistic positions available to female authors. Given the gender segregation of the literary field at mid-century, in which ‘womanly’ writing was associated with the commercial form of romance and ‘manly’ writing with seriousness, the predicament of female authorship is rarely explored in fiction. But when it is, fictional women authors point up the constraints and limits of a ‘feminine’ literary aesthetic in illuminating ways. The article reconstructs how mid-twentieth-century British women authors thought about the act of writing, how they viewed the fields of literary creation and production, and which narrative strategies they used to negotiate this difficult terrain.
Funding source: German Research Foundation 10.13039/501100001659
Award Identifier / Grant number: 264357303
Acknowledgment
Research for this article was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG, project 264357303). For their helpful comments, I would like to thank Dorothee Birke, Gero Guttzeit, Leonie Kappus, Georgina Nugent-Folan, and Sonja Trurnit.
-
Research funding: German Research Foundation (264357303) 10.13039/501100001659.
References
Athill, D. 2000. Stet. A Memoir. London: Granta; New York: Grove.Search in Google Scholar
Barthes, R. 1977 [1967]. “The Death of the Author.” In Image – Music – Text, Trans. S. Heath, 142–8. London: Fontana.10.4324/9781351226387-35Search in Google Scholar
Berensmeyer, I. 2015. “‘What are You Like to Come Home to?’ Domesticity in Postwar British Women’s Poetry and Fiction, 1945–1960.” Anglia 133 (3): 466–8, https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2015-0042.Search in Google Scholar
Berensmeyer, I. 2021. “Female Authorship in Modern Fiction: Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper and the History of Fictional Women Writers.” Authorship 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.21825/authorship.63889.Search in Google Scholar
Berensmeyer, I., G. Buelens, and M. Demoor. 2012. “Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 60 (1): 5–29, https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2012.60.1.1.Search in Google Scholar
Berensmeyer, I., and S. Trurnit. 2022. “Post-War British Women Writers and Their Cultural Impact: A Quantitative Approach.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 7 (1): 81–107, https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.33994.Search in Google Scholar
Bluemel, K., ed. 2009. Intermodernism. Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.1515/9780748635108Search in Google Scholar
Brittain, V. 1947. On Becoming a Writer. London: Hutchinson.Search in Google Scholar
Brittain, V. 1953. Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II. London: Dakers.Search in Google Scholar
Brown, E., and M. Grover, eds. 2011. Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960. Houndmills: Palgrave.10.1057/9780230354647Search in Google Scholar
Campbell, O. W. 1952. The Report of a Conference on the Feminine Point of View. London: Williams & Norgate.Search in Google Scholar
DuPlessis, R. B. 1985. Writing Beyond the Ending. Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Durrell, L. n.d. Letter to ‘Edward Lane.’ Harry Ransom Center, Kay Dick archive, box 6, folder 4.Search in Google Scholar
Egan, J. 2016. “Cultural Futurity and the Politics of Recovery: Mary Renault’s Ambivalent Romances.” Modern Fiction Studies 62 (3): 462–80, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2016.0038.Search in Google Scholar
Ehland, C., and C. Wächter, eds. 2016. Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1945. Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi.10.1163/9789004313378Search in Google Scholar
Farrell, K. 1956. The Cost of Living. London: Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
Gardiner, M. 2010. “Body and State in Spark’s Early Fiction.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark, edited by M. Gardiner, and W. Maly, 27–39. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.1515/9780748637706-006Search in Google Scholar
Gardner, D. 2006. “The Woman Novelist.” In The Woman Novelist and Other Stories by Diana Gardner, 53–67. London: Persephone Books.Search in Google Scholar
Guttzeit, G. 2017. The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe. Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110520156Search in Google Scholar
Hanson, C. 2000. Hysterical Fictions: The ‘Woman’s Novel’ in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Macmillan.10.1057/9780230597365Search in Google Scholar
Hargreaves, J. 1951. Letter to A.D. Peters, 6 July. Harry Ransom Center, Storm Jameson archive, box 10, folder 1.Search in Google Scholar
Humble, N. 2001. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s. Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Johnson, M. 1956. “Plain and Fancy.” Times Literary Supplement 2834: 373.Search in Google Scholar
Lanser, S. S. 1992. Fictions of Authority. Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Light, A. 1991. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London/New York, NY: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Lyons, P. 2010. “Muriel Spark’s Break with Romanticism.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark, edited by M. Gardiner, and W. Maly, 85–97. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.1515/9780748637706-011Search in Google Scholar
Mantel, H. 2008. “Introduction.” In Angel, edited by E. Taylor, 1–6. London: Virago.Search in Google Scholar
McGurl, M. 2009. The Program Era. Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.10.2307/j.ctvjsf59fSearch in Google Scholar
Pugh, M. 2000. Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan.10.1007/978-1-349-21850-9Search in Google Scholar
Pym, B. 2010 [1955]. Less than Angels. London: Virago.Search in Google Scholar
Renault, M. 2014 [1944]. The Friendly Young Ladies. London: Virago.Search in Google Scholar
Sheridan, S. 2009. “In the Driver’s Seat: Muriel Spark’s Editorship of the ‘Poetry Review’.” Journal of Modern Literature 32 (2): 133–42, https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2009.32.2.133.Search in Google Scholar
Spark, M. 1999 [1960]. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar
Spark, M. 2013 [1963]. The Girls of Slender Means. London: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar
Spark, M. 2018. The Complete Short Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.Search in Google Scholar
Spencer, S. 1973. “‘Femininity’ and the Woman Writer: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and the Diary of Anais Nin.” Women’s Studies 1: 247–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1973.9978319.Search in Google Scholar
Stannard, M. 2009. Muriel Spark. The Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.Search in Google Scholar
Sterry, E. 2017. The Single Woman, Modernity, and Literary Culture. Women’s Fiction from the 1920s to the 1940s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-3-319-40829-3Search in Google Scholar
Stewart, V. 2011. “The Woman Writer in Mid-Twentieth Century Middlebrow Fiction: Conceptualizing Creativity.” Journal of Modern Literature 35: 21–36, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.35.1.21.Search in Google Scholar
Taylor, D. J. 2016. The Prose Factory. Literary Life in England Since 1918. London: Vintage.Search in Google Scholar
Taylor, E. 2008 [1957]. Angel. London: Virago.Search in Google Scholar
Taylor, E. 2018 [1947]. A View of the Harbour. London: Virago.Search in Google Scholar
Warhol, R. R. 1989. Gendered Interventions. Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Worthington, M. 2004. “The Novel Construction of the Writer: Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors in The Golden Notebook.” In Literature and the Writer, edited by M. J. Meyer, 59–78. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi.10.1163/9789401201346_005Search in Google Scholar
Zilboorg, C. 2001. The Masks of Mary Renault. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.Search in Google Scholar
Zwierlein, A.-J., ed. 2010. Gender and Creation. Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority, and Authorship. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.Search in Google Scholar
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
