Abstract
This chapter focuses on a selection of formally innovative novels written by British women writers during or immediately following World War II, aiming to contribute to recent work concerned with nuancing accounts of mid-twentieth-century literature. Focusing in particular on the differing ways in which women authors negotiated the tension between the particular and the general in their works, this chapter puts forward a reading of experimental women’s fiction in the wake of the war as a counter example to Cyril Connolly’s assertion in 1947 that “such a thing as avant-garde has ceased to exist”. Drawing on works ranging from Storm Jameson’s The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945), Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House (1947/1948) to Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949) and Rosamond Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove (1953), it argues that these novels, rather than constituting a morally suspect solipsism as some reviews suggested, are concerned with exploring interrelationships between external forces of society and internal states of mind.
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The research for this chapter was financed by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO).
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Van Hove, H. (2021). Feeling “The High-Voltage Current of the General Pass”: Experiments in Subjectivity in British Women’s Fiction in the Wake of World War II. In: Radford, A., Van Hove, H. (eds) British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72766-6_2
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