Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography

Cultural Expressions of World War II

by Elizabeth Maslen

Margaret Storm Jameson (1891–1986) is primarily known as a compelling essayist; her stature as a novelist and champion of the dispossessed is largely forgotten. In Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson, Elizabeth Maslen reveals a figure who held her own beside fellow British women writers, including Virginia Woolf; anticipated the Angry Young Women, such as Doris Lessing; and was an early champion of such European writers as Arthur Koestler and Czesław Miłosz. Jameson was a complex character whose politics were grounded in social justice; she was passionately antifascist—her novel In the Second Year (1936) raised the alarm about Nazism—but always wary of communism. An eloquent polemicist, Jameson was, as president of the British P.E.N. during the 1930s and 1940s, of invaluable assistance to refugee writers. Elizabeth Maslen’s biography introduces a true twentieth century hedgehog, whose essays and subtly experimental fiction were admired in Europe and the States.

578 pages, Hardcover

First published September 5, 2014

Reviews

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably as thorough a biography of Jameson as we are likely to get, given her periodic destruction of her own papers: Maslen has pursued her through a vast array of archives on at least two continents. That said, sometimes it is a bit heavy going, rather like Jameson's life sounds. The main breadwinner for her family and also supporting various relatives (and refugees), involved in activism, taking on all sorts of tasks besides her writing, hardly ever with one settled home, surrounded by demanding friends and loved ones, constant financial troubles...