Introduction: The Interwar Woman Writer: Politics and Aesthetics

Abstract

This special issue is prompted by a concern to probe the ways in which the claims of literary and political engagement were mutually constitutive for interwar women writers. These women lived through two rounds of electoral reform in 1918 and later in 1928, the opening up of the professions to some women through the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, the reform of divorce law in 1924 and 1937, as well as significant socio-political upheaval, including the first Labour government in 1924 and the 1926 General Strike. As they wrote novels, tracts and pamphlets, women writers assumed a wide range of official roles that were informed by the shifting political world in which they found themselves: Winifred Holtby was a member of the Six Point Group and Independent Labour Party; Sylvia Townsend Warner was a committed communist; Naomi Mitchison stood as Labour candidate for the Scottish Universities seat in 1935; Virginia Woolf had a life-long affiliation to the Women’s Co-operative Guild; Storm Jameson was a co-founder member of the Peace Pledge Union. The essays in this issue draw attention to the nuances of the political commitments of interwar women writers and their writing as a site of reflection on these commitments. The introduction situates this edited collection in terms of recent developments in modernist and middlebrow studies and provides summaries for the chapters that follow.