ABSTRACT
English Marxist fiction of the 1930s is little read and much criticized; consequently, the Socialist historical novels written in these years are almost unknown. The choice of ‘Socialist realism’ as the proper form for progressive writers at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers has been taken as an ideological whipping-boy by people who don’t bother to read Marxist novels, because they already know that these must be either boringly naturalistic slices of proletarian life, or else even more boring glorifications of grain silos in Kiev.2 Yet the Popular Front alliance of Communist and liberal intellectuals that produced a rebirth of rich and lively European historical fiction had its counterpart in England, where the record of anti-Fascist historical novels is, in fact, surprisingly long and distinguished. It includes Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novels Summer Will Show (1936) and After the Death of Don Juan (1938), Jack Lindsay’s 1649 (1938) and other novels set in eighteenth-century England and ancient Rome,3 Leopold Myers’ trilogy The Root and the Flower (1934) set in sixteenth-century Mogul India, and Naomi Mitchison’s long novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), as well as her short stories collected in The Delicate Fire (1933) and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), set in first-century Rome. This
One of these stories I saved for you, it was so beautifully Marxian. A Chinese dictator, determined to establish peace in his dominions, took away all the peasants’ weapons. The metal thus collected he had melted down and cast into twelve massive religious figures which adorned his palace. In the end the peasants overthrew him with sharpened bamboos.
