Abstract
The period between 1945 and 1975 was one of major social change in Britain. At the end of the Second World War, the country was bankrupt and the bomb sites that scarred the urban landscape were emblems not only of physical destruction but also of a damaged social and political fabric. However, planning for a better future had already begun during the war, partly in response to the poverty and suffering caused by the Great Depression, the cause of much of the ‘want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’ that Beveridge identified in his 1942 report as obstacles to social progress. Building on Beveridge’s recommendations and as part of the post-war consensus, both Labour and Conservative governments passed legislation that ensured expanded educational opportunities for all, free healthcare, the provision of family allowances and social insurance. The long-term impact of the Welfare State is hard to assess but it undoubtedly lifted many out of poverty and the historian Carolyn Steedman suggests that it also had more intangible psychological benefits. In her memoir Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) she links it with a broader social narrative that recognised the rights of the marginalised and that ‘told me, in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something’.1
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Notes
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986), p. 122.
Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’ in The Collected Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, ed. by J. Uglow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), pp. 37–38.
Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain: 1945–1968 (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd, 1980), p. 2.
D. Mao and R. L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123: 3 (2008), 737–748. As they point out, the remit of such criticism has been extended temporally (modernism is construed as encompassing the period from the mid-C19th to the 1950s and 1960s), spatially (it is conceptualized in what Susan Stanford Friedman calls ‘planetary’ terms) and vertically (modernism now encompasses high and low cultural forms). See
Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies’, Modernism/Modernity 17: 3 (2010), 471–499.
Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 115.
Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3.
Maroula Joannou, Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity: the Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 2.
Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 2.
Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood, Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (London: Leicester University Press, 1998), p. 21.
Deborah Philips, Women’s Fiction 1945–2005 (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 1.
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism [1989] (London: Routledge, 2002) p.31. ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ was published in Angela Carter, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet Books, 1974)
For a detailed discussion of this topic see Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)
See Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel [1970] (London: Macmillan, 1979) and
Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 10.
Doris Lessing, ‘Preface’ to The Golden Notebook [1962] (London: Granada, 1972), pp. 13–14.
Doris Lessing, Collected Stories Volume One: To Room Nineteen [1978] (London: Triad Panther, 1979), p. 346.
Anne Stevenson, ‘Writing as a Woman’ in Women Writing and Writing About Women ed. by Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 172, p. 177.
See R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1967) which argues that psychosis is analogous to a voyage of discovery.
John Feather, A History of British Publishing, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 199.
Iain Stevenson, Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century (London: The British Library, 2010), p. 155.
Diana Athill, Stet (London: Granta, 2000), p. 56.
Gail Low, Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–1968 (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 30.
Gail Low, ‘Publishing Histories’, in A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature, ed. by S. Chew and D. Richards (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 214.
Gail Low, ‘“Finding the Centre?” Publishing Commonwealth Writing in London: The Case of Anglophone Caribbean Writing 1950–65’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 37:2 (2002), pp. 21–38 (p. 31).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).
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Hanson, C., Watkins, S. (2017). Introduction. In: Hanson, C., Watkins, S. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47736-1_1
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