Reviews	British Women Writers 1910-60s: the 'middlebrows'	Previous Recommended Reading

Academic/Non-Fiction

Gwyneth Jones, Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics (2009). Full of sharp and interesting critical thoughts,

Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman (2009). Good to see a new generation of women writing feminist theory/polemic, grappling with the difficulty of finding a solid feminist footing in today's society, Some excellent and telling points and a good sense of the importance of a historical perspective. From a Zero Books, who seem to specialise in these short works: perhaps a slight feeling that it's aimed at the short-attention-span generation.

Lynn Sacco, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History (2009). Though placed in a broader historical context of changing attitudes, the core of this book deals with responses to the prevalence of vulvo-vaginitis, a genital affliction found in young girls (caused by gonnorhoeal infection). On the basis of horrendously tenuous evidence doctors, social workers, etc, made huge efforts to argue for its non-sexual origin, rather than actual sexual transmission by some male relative or household member. Solid and dense study on a horrifying and depressing subject.

Eibhear Walshe, Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (2006). A readable biography of this writer whom I have recently been rediscovering (or perhaps properly discovering for the first time, since I read Mary Lavelle many years ago but none of the others I think).

Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (eds) Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009). A bit of a mixed bag - perhaps too wide-rangingly interdisciplinary? - but some really excellent stuff in there on this ever-interesting and relevant topic.

Michael Swanwick, Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (2009). A remarkable effort at digging up information on a fascinating and rather cryptic figurre who seems almost not to have wanted to be found.

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007). Some of this was fairly familiar territory, e.g. the problematic constructionist vs essentialist debates on sexuality, but this was a thought-provoking read .

Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (2009): anyone who sets out to write a short history of anything at all is not going to please all of the people all of the time. I have some issues around what was in and what was out in this volume, but it was well worth reading, even if I don't think it's the whole story. Recommended even if I do have some cavils.

Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door (2001) - someone recommended this to me after I'd read The Buddha from Brooklyn - it's a similar sort of story about a Buddhist community going pearshaped and a very engrossing read about how enormously high aspirations can go very very wrong.

Selina Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918-1950 (2005). This has understandably been garnering rave reviews. It's an excellent study of young women and employment and its role in the family economy and issues around change and new workplace opportunities and so on during this period, enlivening by the use of memoirs and oral history.

Angela John, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955 (2009). A pretty good study of a neglected woman activist and writer of the early twentieth century - perhaps the very diversity of her interests and activities has, as so often, led to this neglect. It's a bit of half a duology - John has already written a biography of Sharp's long-term lover and eventual (once his first wife had died) husband the war-correspondent Henry W Nevinson. One thing I would perhaps have liked more of was her relationships with other women in her various networks.

Farah Mendlesohn (ed.), On Joanna Russ (2009) - engaging and readable and thought-provoking: a bit uneven, as usual with edited volumes, but with a high percentage of ones I found stimulating.

Sylvia Kelso, Three Observations, and a Dialogue: Round and About SF (2009) Fascinating insights from someone who comes to sf and fandom and feminism and debates about colonialism and post-colonialism from a perceivedly marginal position in Australia: which is a fruitful place to stand to get some interesting perspectives.

Ursula K Le Guin, Cheek by Jowl: talks and essays on how & why fantasy matters (2009). Some very nice stuff, in particular the long piece on animals in children's literature

H G Cocks, Classified: the secret history of the personal column (2009): not at all bad, if a bit slight, inclined to generalisation about context and somewhat a bit simplistic in characterising various decades (and it does rather do conventional periodisation, but that's one way to slice up the data, after all). He's dug up some interesting stuff, it's an easy read, it's got nice vignettes and anecdotes and there's even some analysis. This isn't just one of those books doing 'look at funny stuff about the past and how weird people used to be'. And it's good to let people know that virtual relationships, or at least relationships not mediated within pre-existing communities and social networks, have a much longer history than people think and are not just a product of the internet. And that a lot of the anxieties about them go back quite a long way.

Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007). Very, very good: not just a nuanced and extensively researched insight into a relatively neglected corner of World War II history, but an examination of the role of popular culture in the construction and erosion of memory, gender and the overlooking of women's contribution, etc.

Martha Sherrill, The Buddha from Brooklyn: A Tale of Spiritual Seduction (2000) A disturbing book about how the desire to lead a more spiritually-meaningful life can lead to all sorts of disasters for individuals and communities and the problems arising when a spiritual tradition is imported from somewhere where it has deep cultural roots, to one in which it doesn't, and the misunderstandings and misinterpretations that occur. In addition, interesting on a cult-like development around a female spiritual leader.

Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008). A thick and very readable account of the late Victorian/Edwardian reformer - socialist, pacifist, early environmentalist, and above all, homophile and advocate of reformed intimate relationships.A good solid biography which does a lot of setting in context. Strongly recommended

Susan Sontag, Reborn: early diaries 1947-1964 (2009). Elliptical, sporadic, cryptic, needing quite a bit of editorial intervention by David Rieff (Sontag's son) to contextualise in editing, very much not telling a linear story of her progress from intense teenager to public intellectual - reading lists, comments on books, angst about relationships : surprisingly (perhaps) compelling as a read.

Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet: A personal history, with jigsaws (2009). The nearest thing I've ever come across to G B Stern's delightful 'rag-bag chronicles' in the way it takes random objects and obsessive interests and free associations from these and bits of personal history and anecdote and weaves them together. It's more self-consciously erudite and scholarly than Stern - even when Drabble is describing her own rather random researches into the history of jigsaws and other games and puzzles.Interesting thoughts about the attraction of patterns and apparently pointless time-filling activities.

Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (2007). This is a really excellent book - it's not (what it might have been) a simple celebratory history of a book that grew from a duplicated handout to an international phenomenon. Although it does include the well-researched history of the evolution of OBOS, it does an admirable amount of myth-busting and problematising and is a far richer offering altogether. Among other things Davis's endeavours to situate OBOS in the development of feminist (and other) theorising around the body, making a good case that it did actually have theoretical things to offer about dealing with the actual effects of being embodied in particular ways, as well as its commitment to working from the specifics of individual experience rather than a grand impersonal narrative. Davis's discussion of the migrations of OBOS is fascinating and provocative, where the spirit of the original has been retained but not bogged down by irrelevant specifics. She also strongly emphasises that there are strong local feminist traditions worldwide and a constant to and fro flow of ideas from country to country, as ideas are taken and examined and adapted or transformed. Strongly recommended.

R Proctor and L Schiebinger, eds, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008). This is a wonderful book - it's not perfect, because the whole subject is just at its beginning and things are only beginning to be thought about and defined. And in a volume of edited essays (pretty interdisciplinary) there are going to be some which resonate more than others. But it opens up new perspectives and vistas and generates 'aha' moments. It is about the opposite of epistemology: instead of how knowledge is constructed, it's about how unknowledge is constructed. So it deals both with the things that people don't know (because they're not looking or their mindset means they can't even see certain things) or that they believe wrong things about. There are several articles which deal with the ways in which 'science' is deployed to confuse scientific findings (e.g. over the risks of smoking, or on environmental issues) and the spurious appeal to 'balance' in the debate as if both sides had equal credence. And, of course, sexism is interwoven - there's the lost history of West Indian herbal abortifacients, and the convoluted knowledge/ignorance around the female orgasm. Some of the articles are dense, and some are a bit dry, but it's exceedingly worthwhile reading

Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (2007). A wonderfully rich study of the women of a particular family of the C19th Chinese literati class, who, as a result of a local culture in which female learning and cultural activity was valued, and a family tradition of the same, were respected poets, writers and calligraphers. Densely researched, yet presented in a very readable fashion. All sorts of fascinating material about women's lives and the various possibilites and constraints, the impact of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion, etc etc

***

Fiction (mostly)

Barbara Hambly, Homeland: A Novel (2009). Epistolary novel told in letters between two women, in the lead-up to and the outbreak of the American Civil War and its duration, one in the North and one in the South and both at somewhat of a slant to the communities around them. Beautifully done. I also enjoyed Hambly's historical detective novel published under the name of Barbara Hamilton, set in Boston just before the Revolution, The Ninth Daughter. Have also read with pleasure two graphic novels of a proposed trilogy by Hambly, Anne Steelyard: The Garden of Emptiness (2008-2009)

E H Young, The Vicar's Daughter (1928). Rationing out these as I don't have many of hers left.. Well up to standard - complex familial dynamics, piercing insights, and a surprising twist at the end.

Sherwood Smith, Treason's Shore (2009) - a really great conclusion to this compelling and complex sequence.

Kate O'Brien, The Land of Spices (1941). Excellent novel by O'Brien, set in an Irish convent school just before the Great War, the intersection between the troubled (English) Reverend Mother and a young pupil (and less depressing, ultimately, than Frost in May). More recently read - perhaps not quite as good but still very well worth reading, The Last of Summer (1943) and Pray for the Wanderer (1938), which deal with similar themes of someone used to a more cosmopolitan milieu returning to a family they have never met or have been estranged from in the provinical Irish world of 'Mellick'.

Jacqueline Carey, Naamah's Kiss (2009) and Santa Olivia (2009). Two very different but equally highly readable books by this author. The first was luscious self-indulgence, picking up a generation or so after the Kushiel double-trilogy and the second was very different but surprisingly compelling. It is science fiction, rather than fantasy, bringing freshness to a perhaps well-worn science-fictional trope of the enclosed community and a looming if vague menace. It does deal well with experiences of physical intensity (though of a very different kind than in the Terre d'Ange setting) and complex emotional involvements.

Kudos to the small publisher Greyladies. I have greatly enjoyed the following works they have republished: Noel Streatfield writing as Susan Scarlett, Poppies for England (1947), Clothes-Pegs (1939), Murder While You Work (1944). Streatfield was dismissive of these works as 'potboilers' serialised in women's magazines, much less than her serious work (therefore employing a pseudonym), but they are really rather better than she gave them credit for. Beautifully specific settings and social milieux: a West End dress shop, a holiday camp just after World War II, a munitions factory. Lower middle/working class characters are taken seriously. Very good reads and although written as 'light romances' the romances are relatively unconventional, not the be-all and end-all of the story, and the heroes are not masterful alpha males. Also Josephine Elder, The Encircled Heart (1951) The central character is a woman doctor in the pre-NHS era. Conveys the excitement (based in the author's own experience according to an autobiographical talk incorporated in the volume) about new medical developments. Although the career versus marriage issue plays a large part in the plot, the husband is not demonised for his problems with the demands of his wife's profession. The ending, for the fifties, is wonderful.

A S Byatt, The Children's Book (2009): a lovely, lovely rich fruitcake of a book, though one that is so dense and layered and full of resonances between different parts of the story that the first read is going to miss a lot. A compelling narrative, even though it moves across such a large cast of characters. A few minor quibbles with historical details that probably no-one else would notice, but Byatt gets it pretty much right - the quibbles are very minor in contrast to what is well done and effective and authentic for period.

D E Stevenson, Miss Buncle's Book (1934). I think in my youth I read several of Stevenson's books (the titles elude me...) This was charming and amusing - a spinster in A Typical Literary English Village turns to writing a novel, rather than keeping chickens, when in economic straits. Wackiness ensues...

Several really outstanding works of fantasy: Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest, Jo Walton's Lifelode and Sarah Monette's Corambis (brings this series to a very satisfactory conclusion) were very different (all 2009), but all of them I belted through under narrative compulsion and now need to re-read for all the things I missed or the significance of which I missed the first time through Mike Carey's Thicker Than Water (2009) keeps up the standard of the previous Felix Castor novels and ratcheted up the complications and thickened the worldbuilding considerably. The standard is keeping well up in The Naming of the Beasts (2009)

Marilynne Robinson, Home (2008). Asolutely wonderful: grabbed me just as much as Gilead did: Robinson is thoroughly excellent at making very ordinary things seem compelling and very small things full of deep pregnant significance. Okay, there is one final plot twist which is not going to come as a surprise to anyone who has read Gilead, although it is a revelation to Glory.

Jo Walton, Half a Crown (2008). A wonderful conclusion to this superb trilogy: the extrapolation of what 1960 might have been like was spot-on. Even if the ending was, relatively, happy, it came at high cost, and, although the actions of the central characters were important, they were happening against a background in which popular feeling against the system did seem to be emerging, in a way that seemed historically very plausible indeed. All sorts of small clever touches.

Reviews	British Women Writers 1910-60s: the 'middlebrows'	Previous Recommended Reading: non fiction	Previous Recommended Reading: fiction

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