London Writing in the 1930s offers a new perspective on the decade that has long been associated with the Auden generation and the rise of documentary.
This article explores the fiction of the contemporary British writer Sarah Hall and argues that the evolution of her work centres on its changing treatment of love. Hall's perceptive engagements with ...British regionalism, contemporary politics, and feminism are to be read in the context of her insights into the trials and complexities of interpersonal relationships, with which her central characters tend to struggle. Her latest novel The Wolf Border (2015) is a case in point: it is both a work explicitly about contemporary Britain and one in which all of the central 'issues' are rendered decidedly peripheral, secondary to the main character's transformative experience of love. The thematic shifts require a re-thinking of literary form. Hall's abandonment of genre fiction, with which she experimented in her feminist dystopia The Carhullan Army (2007), in favour of the looser forms of her more recent work, has allowed her to focus on the significance of indecision, indeterminacy, and imperceptible change.
The interwar era saw a boom in women’s hairdressing, with a great number of women in Britain, Europe and America opting to wear their hair short. This article explores the contexts of the evolution ...of these short hairstyles during the 1920s and 1930s in Britain and their representations in the period’s literature and film. It argues that the most popular interwar hairstyles held cultural meanings and associations that were more complex than the often-cited general notions of female independence and that decoding these meanings ought to involve an examination of the material and sensory properties of the hairstyles women wanted. The ‘makeover’ changed not only the woman’s look, but also the texture and ‘feel’ of her hair, and involved complex procedures and technological innovations that offered a range of sensory experiences, from the pleasure of having one’s hair washed to the horror of having it burned. The cultural mythology that grew around the trip to the hairdresser was inseparable from this wealth of sensory detail.
Elizabeth Bowen's meditation on the aesthetic properties of light marked the beginning of a career-long obsession. Bowen would later identify this insistent return to a motif as a species of ...'addiction', and 'all aesthetic choice' as an inevitable 'return' to such chronic addictions.2 It was Bowen's observations of cities, of London and Paris, in the 1930s, that accommodated this fascination with light, especially with artificially lit rooms. But British urban fiction of the 1930s as a whole can be read as a collection of obsessively described, brightly lit interiors.
Soho Nights Cottrell, Anna
London Writing of the 1930s,
10/2018
Book Chapter
For the author who had grown tired of the frenetic life of the West End, the teashops and the red-lipped girls, Soho seemed to be the natural refuge. As the West End’s shabbier cousin, tucked away in ...the narrow streets behind Piccadilly, Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, Soho was often seen as an anomaly, an island of heterogeneity and irregularity in the very heart of the commercialised central London where everything and everyone appeared to be increasingly standardised. By the 1930s Soho had long enjoyed a reputation as London’s most mixed quarter, home to a heady variety of nationalities and
Going to the Cinema Cottrell, Anna
London Writing of the 1930s,
10/2018
Book Chapter
Going to the cinema was the single most important pastime in 1930s Britain. Cinemas boasted ‘some eighteen to nineteen million attendances every week’, with ‘nine hundred and three million cinema ...tickets … sold in 1934’.¹ ‘From flea-pits to fairy-palaces’,² cinemas were everywhere. The picture-palaces were styled as Grecian temples, Spanish villas, baroque mansions and art deco ocean liners. One patron described the Astoria in Finsbury Park as a Moorish paradise: ‘the air was faintly perfumed … overhead one could see what appeared to be a night sky with stars twinkling’.³ Going to the cinema, then, was not just about seeing
Staying Home Cottrell, Anna
London Writing of the 1930s,
10/2018
Book Chapter
Rented rooms make unhappy homes. The literature of 1930s London abounds in tales of dull routines set in cheap lodgings, their inhabitants clinging to dreams of a better job, a nicer room and a ...romance that would put the end to their financial misery as well as their loneliness. For the period’s literary lodgers, London bedsits are always defined in terms of what they lack: space, style and any sense of cosmopolitan freedom. While complaints about the dullness and conformity of the suburbs had become standard by the early 1900s,¹ after 1918 the experience of renting in central London no
Eating Out Cottrell, Anna
London Writing of the 1930s,
10/2018
Book Chapter
In Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Eleanor Pargiter observes a lower-middle-class couple in a restaurant, enjoying their time off after work:
She looked about her. At the next table there was a ...couple dining together; a young man and a girl. They had finished one course; and they were waiting too. The girl had opened her bag and was carefully and deliberately powdering her face; then she took out a little stick and reddened her lips. The young man hitched up his trousers and nonchalantly, as if half-consciously, ran his hand through his hair as he caught sight of himself
Introduction Anna Cottrell
London Writing of the 1930s,
10/2018
Book Chapter
This book is about 1930s writing and photographs of London; in particular, it is about the ways in which the decade’s writers and image-makers represented the spaces of leisure and home that came to ...define the capital during the decade. Central London in the 1930s boasted an inclusive and exuberant leisure culture that became central to the period’s notions of what it meant to be a Londoner and of how this London identity was shaping modern life. London was by no means the only prominent setting in the 1930s, but it was the one that most closely aligned with some
