
From her childhood in Whitby to her long old age in Cambridge, the life of Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), novelist, autobiographer, and political activist, spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century. A self-styled Little Englander by nature, and European by nurture, equally at home, or out of place, in the North Yorkshire moors and seascape of her birth, metropolitan London, rural France, and the capitals of Central Europe, she wrote of country, cities and the exile from both with equal knowledge and sympathy. Out of the changing landscapes of her present, she fashioned her vision of the future. The title of her autobiography, Journey from the North, is a simultaneous evocation and erasure of nostalgia for lost commonality, and in her long life as writer and activist, President of wartime PEN (the association of Poets, Essayist, Novelists) committed to the values of freedom and social justice, she fought to reconcile the conflicting forms of emergent modernity. Her own journey is the generic experience of twentieth-century Britain, and the England she urges on her contemporaries is one that shares the life and mind of Europe. The present book traces the history of that shared experience. It recovers, through her writing, the aspirations and the disappointments of the generation of socialists that was Class 1914. The soldiers returning from the front in 1918, to unemployment and the General Strike of 1926, fight in 1940 alongside Frenchmen, and against Germans, who are victims of the same system: class conflict, nationalist rivalries, imperialist ambition, all for Jameson have the same defining economic horizon. At the end of the odyssey the stark alternatives take shape: Washington or Moscow, the madness of American capitalism, or the oppression of Stalinist Communism. Alongside the narrative of Jameson's life, and the experiences as daughter, wife, and mother that shaped her personality and her career, the book explores her concern with issues of cultur
This biography investigates how Margaret Storm Jameson’s life and literary output reflected the shifting political and cultural landscape of twentieth-century Britain and Europe. Jennifer Birkett, an expert in French and European literature, utilizes Jameson’s extensive body of work—including her novels, autobiographies, and political essays—to map the intellectual development of a writer caught between nationalist identity and a commitment to European unity. The text argues that Jameson’s personal experiences as a woman and activist provided a unique lens through which to critique the systemic failures of the era, from the aftermath of the First World War to the Cold War binary of capitalism and communism.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars and historians recognize this work as a definitive recovery of Jameson’s intellectual legacy, noting the depth of research into her political evolution. Readers frequently highlight the academic rigor of the prose, which effectively contextualizes Jameson’s personal experiences within the broader history of the twentieth-century socialist movement.
Page Count:
400
Publication Date:
2009-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0191567892
ISBN-13:
9780191567896
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