Revolt and engage: the novels of Anita Mason

Abstract

This essay provides an introduction to the novels of Anita Mason, a neglected British author whose substantial body of work deserves wider recognition. It contends that, across the wide variety of historical and geographical settings she employs (from first century Judea to Nazi Germany), Mason's principal concern is with characters who resist unequal divisions of power. Such inequalities are often based around issues of gender, class, and race, but resistance is shown never to be straightforward. Mason's protagonists are often conflicted intellectuals who are torn between their desire for self-determination and a concomitant need for social involvement and collective meaning. Both directions lead either to complicity with tyranny, or to personal disintegration. The essay also argues that, beneath their diverse settings, Mason's novels actually represent a critique of the libertarian discourses foregrounded by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s that were appropriated by politically conservative movements in subsequent decades. Mason's work is important to socially engaged fiction in that her principal characters are attempting to reconcile the often contradictory demands of libertarian and communitarian impulses.