This collection of essays examines the work of five intermodernist writers. Some were established authors before the First World War and others continued to write after the Second World War, but this book focuses particularly on their writing between 1918 and 1939. Elizabeth von Arnim, Stella Benson, Bradda Field, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stella Gibbons and Winifred Watson had much in common: they all wrote novels full of comic moments, which often challenged the cultural politics of the interwar period. Drawing on the literary and critical contexts of each novel, the essays here discuss the use of comic structures that enabled the authors to critique the dominant patriarchal structures of their time, and offer an alternative, sometimes subversive, view of the world in which their characters reside. This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in interwar fiction, focusing principally on novelists who have fallen out of public view. It widens our understanding both of the authors and of the continuing, highly topical debate about interwar women novelists.

Charts the origins and development of the little magazine genre in the Victorian period

George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four 'radical eccentrics' - the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics' vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.

Tina Swift has just arrived in 1920s London from the hinterlands of the United States, expecting to lead a quiet life. But when the street where she works turns into a crime scene, Tina discovers a crucial clue - and her connection to the case keeps growing stronger. Disgusted by a murder the police seem keen to sweep under the carpet, Tina picks up a thread of intrigue that leads all the way back to the trenches of World War I.

Embraced for the dramatic opportunities afforded by a house full of strangers, the British boarding house emerged as a setting for novels published during the interwar period by a diverse range of women writers from Stella Gibbons to Virginia Woolf. To use the single room in the boarding house or bedsit, Terri Mullholland argues, is to foreground a particular experience. While the single room represents the freedoms of independent living available to women in the early twentieth century, it also marks the precariousness of unmarried women’s lives. By placing their characters in this transient space, women writers could explore women's changing social roles and complex experiences – amateur prostitution, lesbian relationships, extra-marital affairs, and abortion – outside traditional domestic narrative concerns. Mullholland presents new readings of works by canonical and non-canonical writers, including Stella Gibbons, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. A hybrid of the modernist and realist domestic fiction written and read by women, the literature of the single room merges modernism's interest in interior psychological states with the realism of precisely documented exterior spaces, offering a new mode of engagement with the two forms of interiority.

New perspectives on women's contributions to periodical culture in the era of modernismThis collection highlights the contributions of women writers, editors and critics to periodical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores women's role in shaping conversations about modernism and modernity across varied aesthetic and ideological registers, and foregrounds how such participation was shaped by a wide range of periodical genres. The essays focus on well-known publications and introduce those as yet obscure and understudied - including middlebrow and popular magazines, movement-based, radical papers, avant-garde titles and classic Little Magazines. Examining neglected figures and shining new light on familiar ones, the collection enriches our understanding of the role women played in the print culture of this transformative period.Key FeaturesHelps recover neglected women writers and cast new light on canonical onesHighlights the geographical diversity of modern British print cultureEmphasises the interdisciplinary nature of modernism, including essays on modernist dance, music, cinema, drama and architecture Includes a section on social movement periodicals

This collection of original critical essays, newly available in paperback, launches an ambitious, long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history.