ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on close readings of a small number of literary works written by women and published in the period of the Second World War. It provides the attention to the difficulties, conflicts and challenges of living and writing in wartime as communicated in letters and fiction about children and noted the similarities and shared discourses that link these works of fiction to British child psychoanalysis. The book identifies new and exciting shared themes and responses between what women were writing in middlebrow novels and areas of psychoanalytic theory that were not widely known to or read by the general public. It focuses on specific areas of infant and young child development and not, or recovered memory. The book explores some of the ways in which psychoanalysis and fiction were mutually informing.