Scholars have long recognised class and gender as significant themes in women's interwar fiction. By showing the ways in which these writers were engaged with and participating in public debates about these questions, my book suggests that their literary accounts of women's lives were invested with a structural, sociological understanding of these issues. The book aims to show that the personal was always political for these women writers.
Dr Clara Jones, Reader in Modern Literature
30 September 2026
'The personal was always political' – new book evaluates interwar women writers
Women writers challenged ideas about class, gender and domestic life by experimenting with genre, suggests Dr Clara Jones, Reader in Modern Literature in the Department of English.
In British Interwar Women Writers: Class, Gender, Genre, Dr Jones examines how women writers experimented with genre as a way of working out and articulating their political views. Their preference for mid- and low-status genres, such as the romance or the thriller, enabled them to communicate politicised messages in an accessible way – yet the conventions of these genres often complicated and unsettled their political thinking too.
Dr Jones argues that these writers demonstrated a critical awareness of what Helen McCarthy calls the 'double lives' of working mothers and anticipated debates about the gendered division of labour in the home and workplace that continue today.
Combining an expansive understanding of the political with the precision of archival research, Clara Jones’s brilliant, nuanced and incisive book is an exciting contribution to modernist studies. Jones reads interwar women authors with acumen and sensitivity, writes about them in a style both crisp and engaging, and shows the generative potential of a feminist approach.
Daniela Caselli, University of Manchester
Dr Jones’ research focuses on the relationship between the political commitments and aesthetic choices of five writers: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ellen Wilkinson, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Amabel Williams-Ellis.
She situates their treatment of maternity, marriage, work, sex, and domesticity in terms of contemporary socio-political debates to offer contextualised accounts of their class and gender politics.
The book also explores the writers’ involvement with the Labour Party, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Dr Jones adopts two understandings of ‘politics’ in the book. Firstly, she considers the writers’ overt involvement in politics, such as Wikinson’s work as a Member of Parliament and Williams Ellis’ membership of the Communist Party. Secondly, she acknowledges the ideological debates that are often not recognised as political due to their domestic nature – such as the philosophies of childcare by Lehmann.
The two understandings of what ‘politics' are – the plural, expansive and predominantly textual and the practical and predominantly ‘real-world’ – not only co-exist but co-animate each other.
Dr Clara Jones
In this story
Reader in Modern Literature