Rebel writers: the accidental feminists
- Submitting institution
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Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 3247
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- ISBN
- 9781448217496
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Rebel Writers:The Accidental Feminists is a biographical study of seven women writers whose debut work appeared between1958 and 1968. Shelagh Delaney, Edna O’Brien, Lynne Reid Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Nell Dunn, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster were in their late teens or early twenties when they emerged as rebellious new talents who wrote about young women’s lives. Apart from a biography of Shelagh Delaney by Selina Todd, also published in 2019, there has been no biographical work on these writers before.
My research included face-to- face interviews with the living writers and their circles. I consulted their autobiographical writing, the memoirs of many related artists and the Random House archives at the University of Reading. Additionally, I consulted the Edna O’Brien papers held at the Centre for Irish Literary Studies at Emory University, and was the first researcher to read Margaret Forster’s personal papers at The British Library, which yielded important new insights into their early publishing history, particularly the withdrawal of the original MS of Forster’s first novel and the contrast between her experience and that of Edna O’Brien with the same publisher, Tom Maschler.
The book breaks entirely new ground in exploring the previously disregarded experiences of young women writers and relating them to the harsh social realities of the post-World War II era. It argues that their work exposed the sexism, inequality and racism of their time, and also challenged existing definitions of writing and writers. By rejecting male-defined forms and values, they spontaneously shared the experiential focus later identified as l’ecriture feminine, and laid a creative foundation for second-wave feminism in the UK. Their commercial success allowed these authors to bypass the London cultural elite and influenced profound social changes.
The book was published in the UK and US by Bloomsbury Caravel in July 2019.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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