‘Witness Literature’ in the Post-war Novels of Storm Jameson and Doris Lessing

Abstract

The two novelists I am exploring are of different generations — Storm Jameson born in 1891, Doris Lessing in 1919 — but both share a commitment, in the aftermath of World War Two, to writing novels that engage with the sense of fragmentation, the tragedies and crises, that afflicted the post-war world in the wake of the traumas of trench warfare in World War One, the rise of totalitarian regimes in the interwar years, the scale of the holocaust, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Inevitably, all these events encouraged writers like Jameson and Lessing to reassess what Western society was about, both at home and abroad. Jameson grew up in the English provinces, Lessing in Southern Rhodesia, yet they share similar concerns. Both had family members who suffered the traumas of World War One: Jameson lost a brother and many friends, while her second husband was not only gassed but, like so many others, emotionally drained by his experiences in the trenches, while Lessing was brought up by parents who were both irreparably damaged by that war. Jameson was very much involved with refugees from Europe during the 1930s, World War Two and the Cold War; Lessing became increasingly aware of the tyrannies imposed by the white colonial powers on the black African communities. So both writers had direct personal experience of twentieth-century traumatic issues that exposed how Western society had mythologised its human image.