ABSTRACT
This book is about political memory and the literature of the 1930s: how it has been remembered, how personal and political memories work in the literature itself, and also how much important writing has not been remembered: especially, though not wholly, the work of women. In English literary culture, the poetry and fiction of the 1930s are accepted features of the twentiethcentury landscape. Established classics of the ‘thirties canon’ include Robin Skelton’s Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties (1964) and the often reprinted novels of Greene, Waugh, Isherwood and Orwell. The past decades have also witnessed the retrospections of Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, the belated publication of texts by W.H.Auden and Stephen Spender, and the republication of many women writers, often reprinted by feminist publishing houses,2 although women are still not commonly perceived as part of ‘thirties history’, a fact whose causes and implications I discuss below (pp. 19-25). Literary autobiographies of the 1930s began to be published in 1939, continued well into the 1990s3 and look set to go on appearing as long as there are survivors. The first accounts of the literature of the 1930s appeared in 1940,4 to which successors are still being produced-including, of course, this book.
