Angry Young Women: Education, Class, and Politics

Abstract

The so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ who were prominent in drama and fiction in the 1950s and 1960s were an amorphous group, yoked together around protest at establishment orthodoxies and a loosely left-leaning politics.1 Members of the group have walk-on parts in the work of several women novelists. Margaret Drabble (1939–) makes passing reference to Kingsley Amis in A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) and an aspiring actor, Simon, is reported to have ‘a reasonably-sized working-class part in a working-class play at the Royal Court’, where John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger premiered in 1956.2 Lynne Reid Banks (1929–) mentions ‘a publishing house specializing in novels by Angry Young Men’ in The L-Shaped Room (1960), and the eponymous William in Sweet William (1975) by Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) talks about ‘that Look Back in Anger stuff’ on a TV programme.3 Amis plays a more significant role in the writing of A. S. Byatt (1936–). There is a scene in Still Life, published in 1985 but set in the 1950s, where Frederica, like Byatt a student at Cambridge University during that time, goes to the Literary Society to hear Amis talk about Lucky Jim (1954). Frederica feels ‘a very simple sexual distaste for Lucky Jim’ and its cruel misogyny and is suspicious about the claims for Amis’s ‘honest stand’ and his ‘decency’ and ‘scrupulousness’.4 In 2001, Byatt returned to this scene in an interview with Philip Hensher. She recalls how, when she started publishing in the 1960s, she was met with ‘all this sort of post-war nonsense, angry young men, nobody has ever reported the English provinces… and the journalists just fell for it. As they fell for it with Look Back In Anger — as though nobody had ever reported lower-middle-class anger before’.5 Byatt’s objections are, at once, ones of sensibility — the sneering, the lack of tolerance she sees in Amis — and political — the sexism and the sudden ‘discovery’ of the lower middle class. Banks expresses a similar distance; she knew many of the group but felt no affinity.6 The closest a woman author might get is in Drabble’s ‘Introduction’ to the Virago edition of Poor Cow (1967) where she humorously describes Nell Dunn (1936–) as ‘an affiliated member of the non-existent school of Angry Young Men’.7