Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life (review)

Despite mounting research that confirms the importance of hitherto neglected twentieth century British women writers, finding publishers and audiences remains a daunting challenge. We must therefore be grateful for the steady stream of biographies whose historical and cultural contexts inflect compelling psychological and social insights that inform and encourage literary study of these writers. A biography of Margaret Storm Jameson is a welcome addition, adding important political and cultural perspectives to ongoing modernist, middlebrow, and other mid-century literary histories and interpretation.

Born in 1891, Margaret Storm Jameson was a contemporary of Rebecca West, Phyllis Bottome, and Naomi Mitchison, and similarly invested her political passions in all her writing. In effect, like West and Bottome, Jameson risked her personal and professional reputations in politicizing her writing with anti-fascist plots and working to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Serious recognition of the significance of Storm Jameson’s life and work is long overdue and Jennifer Birkett is to be applauded for illuminating the life and times of this prodigiously significant writer. As President of British PEN from 1938–1944, in the face of appeasement, fascist aligned members, and world war, Storm Jameson ensured that literature made a difference. Despite her relentless self-criticism and ambivalences about motherhood, marriage, and work, and her often dire economic straits, Jameson wrote novels, radio, and television plays, and polemical journalism on the fate of nations and nationalism as they wreaked havoc in the lives of men and women struggling to preserve their individual humanity.

Interwoven with her expansive canvas of political and social concerns, Jameson’s forty-five novels investigate the nature of narrative itself, as she translated forms of Proust and Stendhal into her own voices and styles. From her first novel in 1919 to her last, in 1973, her settings range from a gritty workaday London to an unnamed colonial outpost, shaped by various experiments with realism and subjects, including women’s personal and professional conflicts in Three Kingdoms (1926), economic and cultural critique in the Mirror in Darkness trilogy (1934–36), anti-fascist dystopias, In the Second Year (1936) and And Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942), experiments with interiority in The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945), and anti-colonial debate in Last Score (1961). Her novels of World War II are riveting and confront us with the ethical angst born of relentless destruction in conflict with this war’s necessity and ambiguous aftermath. They also challenge modernism’s romantic privileging of interiority by representing the invasion of consciousness by threats of world conquest that question the ethics of national identity and loyalty.

Her essays from the 1930s through World War II should be required reading for scholars of fascism, and as an activist response to Virginia Woolf’s theoretical polemic, Three Guineas. Like Woolf and Naomi Mitchison, Jameson visited Berlin in the early 1930s and with lacerating despair, saw the necessity of abandoning pacifism to defeat what she already recognized as Hitler’s plans for world conquest and extermination of anyone considered an untermensch. No British cultural history of these years can be complete or even comprehensible without reading Storm Jameson.

In her laudable efforts to piece together the fascinating strands and contexts of Jameson’s life and writing, Birkett’s devotion to detail sometimes overwhelms her subject. Much of her contextual material and its details highlight the inconsequential rather than the significant events and people that shaped Jameson’s personal and political obsessions and that expand our cultural and historical knowledge. Short shrift is given to Jameson’s agonizing decision to abandon her pacifist convictions in the face of Hitler’s conquests. Birkett welcomes Jameson’s honest vacillations, but then worries that “it could make her seem duplicitous and shallow, in comparison with contemporaries who built their pacifist careers on the profession of more absolute principles” (121). In contrast to this tendentious doleur, the evidence for Jameson’s profoundly complex political thinking is readily available in her 300 letters to Vera Brittain and housed at...