Introduction

Needless to say, twelve years on, my list of women writers between the wars would have been far longer and would have included poets as well as novelists. But although this book is partly intended to correct the currently available gender-blind accounts of the literature of the 1930s, it does not try to make a comprehensive survey of women writers. In other words, it was not written to answer that sixth-former’s question directly, although I remain deeply grateful to her for asking it. True, once I started looking for women writers, I realized that their work had flowered impressively during the 1930s, and was by no means all neglected or out of print, thanks largely to the work of Virago Press. But on the whole, this work was being marketed and read as ‘women’s writing’, abstracted from its historical context. And although this approach (which I used myself in Feminism and Poetry) was certainly a necessary corrective to the conventional omission of women, it did not seem a good way to approach the history of a decade. First, it risked lumping heterogeneous authors together, effacing the obvious differences of genre and outlook which separate, say, politically conservative writers of detective fiction like Dorothy L.Sayers or Margery Allingham from the anti-Fascist historical novels of Sylvia Townsend Warner or Naomi Mitchison. Worse still, such an approach was liable to ignore historical context. To concentrate primarily on the writer’s gender would be an

unhelpful way of reading texts such as Nancy Cunard’s 1934 Negro anthology or Storm Jameson’s Mirror in Darkness trilogy of novels (published 1934-1936), which concern themselves with, respectively, the history, experience and culture of Africans and American Negroes (Cunard), and the political history of post-war England, fictionalized as a Balzacian novel-sequence (Jameson),1 not with the lives of women. Even when one looks at the poetry of the decade, where gender differences certainly are strongly marked, it is clear that Nancy Cunard, Stevie Smith and Naomi Mitchison all have more in common in terms of theme and style with their ‘Audenesque’ male contemporaries than they do with, say, Elizabeth Daryush or Laura Riding. To read any of these simply as women writers would be to adopt a form of tunnel vision which would only reverse the historians’ traditional blind spot for women (and would, incidentally, have irritated the writers considerably had they known of it).