Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars

by Alison Light

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars.

From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernising in outlook. In a series of literary anaylses, the author suggests some of the tones and accents of this new version of Englishness; in particular she looks at new kinds of readership and fiction, at the historical and emotional significance of the `whodunit', the burgeoning of historical romance, and the creation of a middlebrow culture in the period.

Forever England evokes a powerful sense of period and of the pleasures of reading, providing an intimate picture of interwar life from inside the English middle classes. As a feminist inquiry, it argues from a different kind of social and political history; one which makes connections between the interior structures of private life and their more public national forms. Controversially, it also urges that feminism deal with conservative, as well as radical, desires and their place in women's lives.

Genres: History, British Literature, Womens

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Polly Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work explores, through readings of various middlebrow twentieth century women novelists, how best-selling popular literature defined middle-class femininity, focussing on the interwar years and writers like Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier.

Alison Light's genius lies in her resonant, empathic response to genre texts, and her clear-sighted observations of class considerations at play in this arena.

She constructs a convincing argument that the 1970s feminist movement -- led by progressive, upper-middle class types hating their own housework because they can't get servants any more -- has had less success than it might have, had it not disrespected domestic work, thereby alienating most British women, especially those who or whose forebears worked in domestic service.

[C. B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is fantastically stimulating and rather ingenious. Light’s thesis — that the domestic and the feminine became central in constructions of Englishness during the interwar years — is convincingly argued. This thesis is set out explicitly in the Introduction and the Conclusion. In the intervening chapters, we’re given a kind of chronology of this process through several in-depth literary case studies: from the shock of war found in the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett, to the ‘compromise’ of Agatha Christie’s middlebrow murder mysteries, and to the self-confident homeliness of Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver. Forever England reminds historians of the importance of historicising seemingly self-evident categories; in this case, conservatism and middle-classness. One should always interrogate as a historian, and this book is a testament to the fruitfulness of these sorts of projects. This was such a pleasure to read!

[Candy Wood]

I wonder if anyone has read all four authors who are the focus of Light’s book: Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, Jan Struther (who wrote Mrs. Miniver), and Daphne du Maurier. Though they seem very different, it does work to consider them together as indicators of ideas about femininity, class, and domesticity between the wars. Clearly, Light resists labels like highbrow and middlebrow, and she sees techniques usually associated with literary modernism - for example, irony and a “language of reticence” - in both Compton-Burnett and Christie. All four writers show how the definition of the middle class was changing: Mrs. Miniver has servants but gets along with them as Virginia Woolf did not with hers, as recorded in her diaries. And all four writers have contributed to definitions of Englishness. The discussion is supported with quotations from the works as well as biographical detail and reference to popular culture, especially film versions.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent study of women's books between the wars, especially focusing on Jan Struther, who wrote Mrs Miniver, Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier. A shame that this is out of print and fiendishly expensive second-hand - fortunately my local library had a copy.