Histories of the Defeated: Writers Taking Sides in the 1930s

Abstract

Looking back at the inter-war period, Storm Jameson saw it divided into two parts with the energetic twenties, ‘lively with ideas, dreams, hopes, experiments’ (Jameson, 1984, 292), superseded by the grim political urgencies of a struggle between opposing forces in the thirties:

I saw that two sides were struggling for mastery of the future. On one side was the idea of the Absolute State, with its insistence on total loyalty to the words and gestures of authority, its belief in the moral beauty of war, its appeal to the canaille: Germany awake, kill, hate, Sieg Heil, and the rest of it. On the other all that was still hidden in the hard green seed of a democracy which allowed me freedom to write and other women freedom to live starved lives on the dole. (293)