Introduction: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice

Abstract

Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 is primarily a work of literary history which provides a scholarly account of women’s writing during the 1940s and the 1950s, making some attempt to contribute to wider debates and cultural narratives. The book offers an alternative to the usual period demarcations of twentieth-century literary history which take 1945 as a watershed in addressing the writing of the 1950s in tandem with the 1940s: a time-span that makes it possible to look closely at the ramifications of the war which were felt by women long afterwards. I use a synthesis of historical retrieval, literary theory and textual analysis to provide culturally situated and historically specific readings of a wide range of texts addressing issues that relate to the changing experience of women at this time. Examples are the displacements of war, women’s radically altered understandings of their own sexuality, the retreat from empire, the relationship of women to the idea of nation, the migrant experience, the literary representation of Welsh, Scottish and English identity, and the meanings of home.