Antifascist women writers and interwar magazines

Abstract

This thesis puts magazine contributions by three antifascist women writers – Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, and Sylvia Townsend Warner – into dialogue with their novels and non-fiction books. It argues that these writers’ gendered experiences of interwar Britain enabled them to perceive fascism as a transnational, European reaction to social changes precipitated by women’s entry into political and professional life during – and in the years immediately following – the First World War. In the late 1920s, Woolf recognised the presence of Italian Fascism’s ideology of racial male superiority in British middlebrow culture. In the early 1930s, Jameson feared that intensified economic competition, resulting from women’s entry into the professional labour market, was making the British middle class vulnerable to fascism’s appeal, echoing events in Germany. And in the late 1930s, Warner understood both Nazism and Oswald Mosley’s British fascism as a threat to the freedom of emancipated women like herself, prompting her to collaborate with the organised working class in the antifascist Popular Front coalition. This thesis argues that, rather than merely critiquing fascism to provoke a rejection of it, Woolf, Jameson, and Warner all sought to use their writing to elicit active, antifascist responses from readers, in the form of independent thought or political action. It argues that interwar magazines, which segmented readers into well-defined demographics, facilitated these writers’ political objectives by providing them with access to particular audiences, which they may have struggled to reach through their books alone. To disseminate their antifascist politics effectively, Woolf, Jameson, and Warner tailored their contributions’ aesthetics and thematic content to these audiences’ politics and literary tastes, using them, at times, to market their books. However, magazines could also frustrate the achievement of these writers’ political objectives by imposing generic or political limitations on women’s writing, through editorial decisions or reviewing practices. This thesis examines the ways in which Woolf, Jameson, and Warner sought to challenge or circumvent such gendered limitations, both in their magazine contributions and in their books.

Date of Award	25 Jan 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Vike Plock (Supervisor) & Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (Supervisor)