Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars. From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernising in outlook. In a series of literary anaylses, the author suggests some of the tones and accents of this new version of Englishness; in particular she looks at new kinds of readership and fiction, at the historical and emotional significance of the `whodunit', the burgeoning of historical romance, and the creation of a middlebrow culture in the period. Forever England evokes a powerful sense of period and of the pleasures of reading, providing an intimate picture of interwar life from inside the English middle classes. As a feminist inquiry, it argues from a different kind of social and political history; one which makes connections between the interior structures of private life and their more public national forms. Controversially, it also urges that feminism deal with conservative, as well as radical, desires and their place in women's lives.