Margaret Storm Jameson Correspondence PDF Download

Author: Storm Jameson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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Book Description
The Margaret Storm Jameson correspondence consists of 66 autograph and typescript letters and one greeting card from Storm Jameson to Ignace and Madame Legrand, P. Beaumont Wadsworth, and Marjorie Watts and dates from 1941-1979.

Author: Jennifer Birkett
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191567896
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
From her childhood in Whitby to her long old age in Cambridge, the life of Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), novelist, autobiographer, and political activist, spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century. A self-styled Little Englander by nature, and European by nurture, equally at home, or out of place, in the North Yorkshire moors and seascape of her birth, metropolitan London, rural France, and the capitals of Central Europe, she wrote of country, cities and the exile from both with equal knowledge and sympathy. Out of the changing landscapes of her present, she fashioned her vision of the future. The title of her autobiography, Journey from the North, is a simultaneous evocation and erasure of nostalgia for lost commonality, and in her long life as writer and activist, President of wartime PEN (the association of Poets, Essayist, Novelists) committed to the values of freedom and social justice, she fought to reconcile the conflicting forms of emergent modernity. Her own journey is the generic experience of twentieth-century Britain, and the England she urges on her contemporaries is one that shares the life and mind of Europe. The present book traces the history of that shared experience. It recovers, through her writing, the aspirations and the disappointments of the generation of socialists that was Class 1914. The soldiers returning from the front in 1918, to unemployment and the General Strike of 1926, fight in 1940 alongside Frenchmen, and against Germans, who are victims of the same system: class conflict, nationalist rivalries, imperialist ambition, all for Jameson have the same defining economic horizon. At the end of the odyssey the stark alternatives take shape: Washington or Moscow, the madness of American capitalism, or the oppression of Stalinist Communism. Alongside the narrative of Jameson's life, and the experiences as daughter, wife, and mother that shaped her personality and her career, the book explores her concern with issues of culture and society, cultural memory, and cultural landscapes, her fascination with aesthetic form and the relation of writing to politics, her insight into the materiality of words, and her persistent probing of the nature of the writing subject. It draws on unpublished archive material and brings new research on neglected areas of cultural history into conjunction with literary-critical analyses of Jameson's novels and studies of her journalism and essays. There is an extensive Bibliography of her work.

Author: Jennifer Birkett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199558205
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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The life-story of Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), prolific novelist and political activist. In her time Jameson gained international recognition for her writing and for her wartime work as President of PEN, fighting for freedom and social justice while rescuing refugees from Nazi Europe and British internment camps.

Author: Jennifer Birkett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781847181824
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From her birth in Whitby in 1891, to her death in Cambridge in 1986, Margaret Storm Jamesonâ (TM)s life and writing spanned the greater part of the twentieth century. She was, in every sense, a woman of her time, speaking to the long series of generations she lived through of their collective present, past and future. Out of her own life-history she created a mirror reflecting the long twentieth-century transformation of Europe. This collection of essays, the first volume to be devoted entirely to Jameson, brings together a distinguished group of academics to analyse the impressive range and variety of her work. Their studies follow the chronology of her career from the 1920s to the 1960s. They review the different modes in which she wrote (fiction, journalism, autobiography), and show how effectively her writing engages with the contested issues of the period (socialism, fascism, pacifism, exile, communism, colonialism) and with key historical events (the First World War, the General Strike, the Munich Pact, the Second World War, the Cold War). They place her writing in relation to other writers of the day, both her English connections and her European models, in order to underline its relevance, recover forgotten networks of activism and collaboration, and restore Jameson to the pivotal role she played during her lifetime. In the process, the conventional categorisations of twentieth-century writing come under pressure: reviewing Jamesonâ (TM)s links with early modernist journals, and highlighting overlooked connections between British and Continental modernisms, these essays help redefine the field of modernist studies. The collection closes with a sequence of unpublished letters from Jameson to the feminist, historian, and social activist Hilary Newitt Brown, a lively, first-hand account of literary, political and everyday life in England during the Second World War. Jameson was first and foremost a stylist, whose work on the relations of aesthetics and politics challenges simplistic critical divides between modernism and documentary realism. She was a key activist in politics and cultural politics, and an analyst of feeling, and the part it plays in both politics and everyday life. Last but not least, she was a chronicler of public life, and of the collective experience of England and Europe in the twentieth century. This volume proposes a re-assessment of Jamesonâ (TM)s overall significance in the writerly landscape of her time; in the process, it suggests perspectives in which that landscape is itself ripe for revision. For someone who published so many novels, among them ones of real distinction, Storm Jameson was unusually prone to self doubt. â ~Its singular badness proves that I was not a born novelistâ (TM), she remarked of her early and very interesting novel, The Pot Boils (1919), and in her autobiography, Journey From the North, she more than once suggests that her chosen career was a mistake, or at all events led to no great achievement. That she rarely made much money from her novels is true. Yet as every page of the autobiography shows, and as a cache of letters included in the present book further reveals, Jameson was a born writer. These letters, which have never before been published and which perhaps provide the bookâ (TM)s high point, were written over a period of some fifty years to her close friends, Hilary Newitt Brown and Harrison Brown, an English couple who, foreseeing the coming of the Second World War, in 1937 settled in British Columbia and to whom Jameson could talk with unabashed candour â " for example, of her fearful loathing of Hitler and fascism, of her contempt for most politicians, and of her sense of outrage at the pusillanimity, backsliding and ill faith of officialdom in wavering about whether to grant refugee status to writers and intellectuals she was trying to get out of continental Europe before the Nazis got to them. Jameson was deeply involved in P.E.N., whose English president she became in 1939, but this alone wonâ (TM)t account for her hard work on behalf of other writers. These letters are vivid testimony of the tensions, fears and difficulties of the times, both before, during and after the war. But what makes them so appealing is Jamesonâ (TM)s often excoriating wit. Of Chamberlainâ (TM)s relationship with the French government in 1938, she remarks: â ~it isnâ (TM)t true C let the French down. He didnâ (TM)t have to this time. They were taking the lift down so fast he had to run to get into itâ (TM) (p.185). And, in 1940, with Britain under siege, she notes, â ~I donâ (TM)t know where the Munich spirit is, I mean, what stone it has crawled under. No doubt you could lift a stone or two and find things come crawling out. I know where one or two such stones lie. But the ordinary people are fineâ (TM) (p.193). The essays that make up Writing in Dialogue rightly consider some of the ways in which Jameson finds fictional form in which to explore her awareness that the worth of â ~ordinary peopleâ (TM) is threatened by forces that they must try to control or be controlled and oppressed by. Her writing career more or less coincides with what Eric Hobsbawm has called â ~The Age of Extremesâ (TM) â " that is, 1913-1989 â " and her novels try to account for the ageâ (TM)s dark, violent forces, and at the same time, and despite a period as a pacifist and although she was a committed socialist, try not to buy into any of what Orwell, with pugnacious relish, called â ~the smelly little orthodoxies that contend daily for our souls.â (TM) As the editors remark in their Introduction, â ~Jameson has suffered from the tendency in feminist scholarship to focus solely on female writing for its representation of womenâ (TM)s lives and to ignore their political work except in terms of their feminismâ (TM) (p. 3). In this context, it is notable that Rosamond Lehmann is quoted as finding Jamesonâ (TM)s â ~Munichâ (TM) novel, Europe to Let, â ~electrifying and ferociousâ (TM), and motivated by a â ~a passionate disgust and indignation combined with a masculine intelligence.â (TM) Iâ (TM)m surprised that Kate McLoughlin, who quotes this in her interesting essay, â ~Voices and Values: Storm Jamesonâ (TM)s Europe to Let and the Munich Pactâ (TM), doesnâ (TM)t consider the implications of that phrase â ~masculine intelligenceâ (TM); but other essays engage with the formal consequences of Jamesonâ (TM)s determination to produce novels of ideas. Hence, Brigantiâ (TM)s â ~Mirroring the Darkness: Storm Jameson and the Collective Novelâ (TM) â " though in any discussion of the trilogy Mirror in Darkness (1934-36) I would have thought it worthwhile to consider Dos Passosâ (TM)s 1920s U.S.A. trilogy, given the impact it made overseas as well as in America, and in view of its authorâ (TM)s professed communist sympathies. Hence, too, Sharon Oudittâ (TM)s valuable essay on the â ~Men, Women and World War I in the Fiction of Storm Jamesonâ (TM) â " though, if, as Ouditt shows, Jameson had to overcome the prejudice against women being non-combatants and thus â ~at best peripheral to warâ (TM) (p. 57), I donâ (TM)t see why Arnold Bennettâ (TM)s The Pretty Lady (1918) shouldnâ (TM)t come into the reckoning, given that Bennett was also a non-combatant and yet for my money produced one of the very best novels to emerge from that period, one that deals quite brilliantly with the effects of war on the home front. Hence, too, Jennifer Birkettâ (TM)s insistence that Jameson looked to writers outside England for her peers. In her pages on â ~The Shape of Evil: Before the Crossing and The Black Laurelâ (TM), and especially in her telling remark on Jamesonâ (TM)s â ~self-flagellating insight into the necessary cruelty of authorial visionâ (TM) (p. 130), Birkett as good as buries Angus Wilsonâ (TM)s contention in The Wild Garden (1963) that English novelists have been unable to write about evil. Given Dickensâ (TM)s novels, this was anyway a fairly daft claim. But Wilsonâ (TM)s intention was to rebuke English readers not so much for a complacent humanism as for their indifference to those novels of ideas he associated with continental Europe. As a corrective to such indifference he could have looked closer to home. He could and indeed should have looked to Jameson. And as someone who himself could be properly satiric about the pretensions and venality of the literary life, Wilson should have been much taken by Jamesonâ (TM)s 1962 novel, The Road From the Monument, a most subtle dissection of male vanity, egoism, and self-deception. This late novel isnâ (TM)t discussed in Writing in Dialogue. Nor are quite a few others. I grant that not all are important. Others however are, and it would have been good to see them at least mentioned. (The so-called comedies are for the most part ignored.) Still, you canâ (TM)t have everything and Writing in Dialogue gives us a good deal. The essays are consistently interesting, readable, informative, and without an air of special pleading. With their publication we can reasonably hope that the reputation of this important novelist is now on the mend. â "John Lucas, Key Words, A journal of Cultural Materialism - Nottingham Trent University

Author: Elizabeth Maslen
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810129795
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Elizabeth Maslen's excellent biography offers a fresh look at the intersection of Jameson's life and work and the way these intersected with figures from Rebecca West to Arthur Koeslter to Czeslaw Milosz.

Author: Katherine Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350094447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The novels of Storm Jameson and their depictions of Britain's relationship to Europe around the Second World War represent a crucial departure from the work of her contemporaries. As the first female President of English PEN, Jameson led her country's wartime literary community through turbulent times in history by focusing on European – rather than pointedly British – experiences of war. War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson is a timely critique situated within the historical and theoretical contexts so fundamental to understanding her work. Presenting previously unpublished archival material that documents her work as an ambassador for British writers during a time of national upheaval, Katherine Cooper reveals how the novelist's pacifism and evolving attitudes to war and peace were underpinned by her overarching vision for the post-war world. Drawing comparisons to the works of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and others, this study shows how Jameson's novels gesture towards prevalent internationalist perspectives and reshapes how we view the literary history of the period.

Author: Storm Jameson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1

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Author: Theophilus Ernest Martin Boll
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838611562
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Annie and Liam call on their friends Francis and Zoe to help when a strange group visits Treecrest and takes over the hunting grounds.

Author: Catherine Clay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351954504
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Catherine Clay's persuasively argued and rigorously documented study examines women's friendships during the period between the two world wars. Building on extensive new archival research, the book's organizing principle is a series of literary-historical case-studies that explore the practices, meanings and effects of friendship within a network of British women writers, who were all loosely connected to the feminist weekly periodical Time and Tide. Clay considers the letters and diaries, as well as fiction, poetry, autobiographies and journalistic writings, of authors such as Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Stella Benson, to examine women's friendships in relation to two key contexts: the rise of the professional woman writer under the shadow of literary modernism and historic shifts in the cultural recognition of lesbianism crystallized by The Well of Loneliness trial in 1928. While Clay's study presents substantial evidence to support the crucial role close and enduring friendships played in women's professional achievements, it also boldly addresses the limitations and denials of these relationships. Producing 'biographies of friendship' untold in existing author studies, her book also challenges dominant accounts of women's friendships and advances new ways for thinking about women's friendship in contemporary debates.

Author: Kristin Bluemel
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748688560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
This collection of original critical essays, newly available in paperback, launches an ambitious, long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history.