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Diana Wallace
Literature
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Book
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Introduction
Cleopatra and Octavia, of course, never met, at least not in Shakespeare’s version of the story. Their conception of each other is always that of the ‘Other Woman’ in the triangle – wife or mistress – and is m...
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Conclusion
Rosamond Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove (1953) brings together the themes I have been discussing and offers a retrospective on the interwar period. The novel’s framework is a reconciliatory dialogue between two sist...
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‘An Age of Transition’: Historical Context
Gender identity was a site of special conflict and anxiety, exacerbated by an anti-feminist backlash. ‘There had been a rise of feminism’, Holtby remarked, ‘there is now a reaction against it’ (1934, 151). Acc...
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Rewriting the Victorians: May Sinclair’s Transitional Modernism
May Sinclair’s publishing career – from 1897 to 1927 – spans and exemplifies an important transitional moment in the shift from Victorian and Edwardian realist fiction to modernism. Although it was Sinclair wh...
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A ‘Shared Working Existence’: Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby
The friendship between Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain offers an example, not so much of a rare relationship between women, but of one which has been unusually fully documented and discussed. Part of a new g...
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The ‘Recurring Dream’ of Romance: Rosamond Lehmann
The youngest of these five writers, Rosamond Lehmann at first sight seems the most conservative, her work a flight back into the world of the private, the intimate and the subjective which has traditionally be...
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Theorising Female Rivalry
From the psychoanalytic point of view the original erotic triangle is, of course, the Oedipal triangle which underpins all Freud’s thinking, including the two influential essays on female development which he ...
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The ‘Other Woman’: Rebecca West’s ‘Difference of View’
Rebecca West’s life was shadowed by her own role as the ‘other woman’ in a triangle drama. Her position as mistress of the married H.G. Wells not only dominated her life during the decade-long affair, necessit...
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‘My Second Self’: Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain
The friendship between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby epitomises the problematic differences between married and single women during the inter-war period. Brittain’s marriage in 1925 required an even greate...
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Postscript
Women’s historical novels have been critically dismissed or, perhaps worse, ignored because they have been perceived as nostalgic, escapist, irrelevant or simply as ‘trash’. In fact, as I have shown, the genre...
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Introduction
Women’s relationship with ‘real solemn history’ — that catalogue of kings and popes and battles lost and won — has often been ambivalent, but they have been reading and enjoying historical novels for well over...
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Histories of the Defeated: Writers Taking Sides in the 1930s
Looking back at the inter-war period, Storm Jameson saw it divided into two parts with the energetic twenties, ‘lively with ideas, dreams, hopes, experiments’ (Jameson, 1984, 292), superseded by the grim polit...
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Hollow Men and Homosexual Heroes: Exploring Masculinity in the 1950s
In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor (1954), the despotic patriarch John Barnard goes down into the wine cellar of the family home to check the port wine laid down by his father. He finds there the stacks...
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Selling Women’s History: Popular Historical Fiction in the 1970s
In the 1970s the woman’s historical novel was widely visible but in a range of sub-genres regarded as popular fiction and therefore disregarded by literary critics: the historical romance associated with Mills an...
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Dialogues with the Dead: History and the ‘Sense of an Ending’, 1990–2000
The 1990s were, as Patricia Waugh put it, an ‘era of belatedness, of a generalised “post”-condition’ (1995, 33). Theorists talked about ‘postmodernism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postcolonialism’, ‘post-industrial...
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Entering into History: The Woman Citizen and the Historical Novel, 1900–1929
A few women were writing historical novels in the early years of the twentieth century, including Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel adventures, the extravagant romances of Marjorie Bowen, and the rural novels...
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Writing the War and After: Wicked Ladies and Wayward Women in the 1940s
During the war, reading was an important form of escape from tension, fear and boredom. In 1944, a Mass Observation survey of 10,000 readers found that their strongest desire was for ‘relaxation’ and that most...
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The Return of the Repressed: Maternal Histories in the 1960s
Penguin’s victory in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 seems, in retrospect, to mark the opening victory of liberated modernity over the old guard (those stuffy elders who, famously, would not want their wife or ...
