The Politics of 1930s British Literature by Natasha Periyan (review)

Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning’s Historicizing Modernism series “stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources” and Natasha Periyan’s work exemplifies this approach to historicism (xiii).¹ Arguing for the centrality of education in the literature of the 1930s, Periyan departs from both Samuel Hynes’s focus on crisis and war in The Auden Generation and from the expansive analysis of the dialogue between literature and society in Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties.² Philosophically, Periyan draws inspiration from Max Saunders’s work on modernist autobiography to underline the interplay between writers’ engagements with education and their performance of these educational “self-impressions” in writing (19).³ Blending diverse archival and primary textual material from middlebrow and highbrow authors, and defining the 1930s as a “long” decade, she fulfills the series editors’ aim of “establishing broader intellectual genealogies of modernism” (xiii). Periyan does this while reassessing totemic texts explored in seminal historicist critiques of the period through the lens of contemporary educational discourse, arguing that “education provided a currency for social transformation and a mode of political critique for writers from across the highbrow and middlebrow; the intermodernist and late modernist scenes” (15).

Beginning with W. H. Auden, Periyan engages with the primacy of Hynes and Cunningham in discussions of politics and literature of the 1930s. Periyan discerns Auden’s democratic educational ethos in his “Raynes Park School Song,” a version of which is still sung at the school today. Published in two school magazines, and signed “Very Anon,” it foregrounds individual choice instead of traditional appeals to esprit de corps (43). While exploring Auden’s individualist critique of D. H. Lawrence’s notion of a “higher, responsible, conscious class” in Education Today and Tomorrow, Periyan reminds us that Auden linked the “leadership theory” of the selection camps of Nazi Germany with the “ladder theory” of the class-based education system in England, challenging Cunningham’s assessment of the submergence of the bourgeois “I” in the proletarian “we” in Auden’s work (51, 22). Periyan also weaves in Auden’s comments in “A Review of English Poetry for Children by R. L. Mégroz” about non-poets teaching poetry appreciation, “imposing their personal taste on the immature, a spiritual bullying” (38). Auden’s ultimate disappointment with a democratic pedagogy is clear in the chapter’s concluding quotation in which he despairs of group discussion and decides to simply “talk all the time” (57). In addition to Hynes’s analysis of Auden’s parabolic literary style, however, Periyan delineates a democratic, educative, interrogative register alongside this (17).

While the new art was to be vernacular, the next chapter’s focus on members of the Six Point Group and fellow teachers Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, implies that Periyan identifies a significant tension between the style of middlebrow novelists and the “democratic” art of Auden. In her analysis of Holtby’s contributions to The Schoolmistress, Periyan discovers that the writing implies “a readership with a rich social and intellectual life,” reflected in the character of the headmistress, Sarah Burton, in South Riding: Holtby redefined “spinster” as a term of liberation and empowerment rather than bitterness and frustration (73). Periyan unearths archival evidence of Holtby’s activism in the papers of the National Union of Teachers, noting that Holtby was keen to explode the myth that teaching was still “the Cinderella of the professions,” as she put it in a celebrated speech to the Scarborough Conference in 1935 (72). The analysis of Holtby’s influence on Brittain’s work highlights the fact that feminist activism in education took not only surprisingly conservative forms such as girls’ school songs that sought to emulate what Holtby referred to as the “Kipling feeling,” but also subversive turns such as boys’ school speech day addresses that underlined the vocation of men as husbands in the domestic sphere (87, 91).

The chapter on The Old School proposes that Graham Greene’s contributors not only documented...