The History of British Women's Writing 1945-1975

This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers’ engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of ‘second-wave’ feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women’s writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.

Clare Hanson is Professor of Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Southampton, UK. She has published widely on the short story and on twentieth-century women’s writing and is the author of Hysterical Fictions: the Woman’s Novel in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave, 2000), A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture in Britain, 1750-2000 (Palgrave, 2004) and Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain (2012). Between 2010 and 2012 she was co-editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing. Her current research explores the relationship between genetics and the literary imagination.

Susan Watkins is Professor in the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University, UK. She is the author of Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice (Palgrave, 2001) and Doris Lessing (2010), and co-editor of Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2006) and Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (2009). She was Chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association from 2010-2014 and co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature from 2010-2015.