ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that Margaret Storm Jameson's work, also staging the spectacle of complacency and ignorance that was England's collective sleepwalk to destruction, is a call to awakening and resistance. It discusses how her political experience in the inter-war years equipped her to make this call. The chapter explores the writing techniques that turned her own political understanding into an empowering experience for her readers. A combination of D. H. Lawrence and Compton Mackenzie produces Storm Jameson; that is, writing that seeks to pass as avant-garde social realism, but is mere popular fiction, slightly louche romance, tailor-made for pretentious young feminists with murderous potential. Elected to the Poets, Essayists, Novelists (PEN) committee in October 1934, she helped build vital contacts between PEN and the expanding European networks of liberal and Socialist intellectuals. Finding the means to identify and represent likenesses was her preoccupation in the 1930s.
