• Mid-century women's writing
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Mid-century women's writing

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This book re-examines British women’s writing in the mid-century and its relationship to public and domestic spaces.
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  • 20 January 2026
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The traditional narrative of the mid-century (1930s-60s) is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women’s writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. Mid-century women's writing: Disrupting the public/private divide aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics.
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Price: £30.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 20 January 2026
ISBN: 9781526195517
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Women, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literature: history and criticism
REVIEWS Icon

Introduction: Politicizing the domestic and domesticizing politics — Melissa Dinsman, Megan Faragher, and Ravenel Richardson
Part I: Introduction - Professionalizing the domestic — Megan Faragher
1 Professional identity and personal space in Mary Renault’s Kind are her Answers and Return to Night— Victoria Stewart
2 Talking shop: Celia Fremlin and invisible work — Luke Seaber
3 ‘some thoroughly tiresome housekeeping crisis’: Rebecca West’s wartime journalism — Debra Rae Cohen
4 ‘Coldly kind’: Calculating care in post-war British women’s writing — Emily Ridge
Part II - Introduction: Nationalizing gender politics – Melissa Dinsman
5 New world women and the Labour party win in Marghanita Laski’s The Village — Sarah E. Cornish
6 Beyond ‘companionate marriage’: Elizabeth Taylor’s gendered critique of post-war consensus in A View of the Harbour and A Wreath of Roses — Geneviève Brassard
7 Dissident friendship and revolutionary love in the novels of Sabitri Roy and Sulekha Sanyal — Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay
8 The political theory of heaven: Religious nationalism, mystical anarchism, and the Spanish Civil War in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s After the Death of Don Juan — Charles Andrews
Part III - Introduction: Women beyond the nation — Ravenel Richardson
9 ‘A woman is always a woman!’: British women writers and refugees — Katherine Cooper
10 Families in a time of catastrophe: Anna Gmeyner’s Manja, 1920-1938 – Phyllis Lassner
11 ‘Some other land, some other sea’: Attia Hosain’s fiction and nonfiction in Distant Traveller – Ambreen Hai
Bibliography
Index