Storm Jameson

Jameson was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, eldest child of sea captain and former shipbuilder William Storm Jameson and his wife (and stepsister) Hannah Margaret Galilee, from a family of wealthy Whitby shipbuilders;[3][4] she briefly attended school at the Scarborough Municipal, before studying at the University of Leeds.[2] She moved to London, where she earned a Masters of Arts degree from King's College London in 1914, and then went on to teach before becoming a full-time writer. She married the author Guy Chapman,[2] but continued to be published under her maiden name, Storm Jameson. Though she predominantly used her own name, she also published three novels pseudonymously in 1937–38. The first two used the name James Hill and the third one was published under the name William Lamb.

Jameson became active in politics and was a strong advocate of women having the vote. She joined the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and took part in the Women's Pilgrimage in 1913 to demonstrate to the House of Commons how many women wanted the vote.[5]

Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, from 1939,[2] and active in helping refugee writers. Additionally, she was a founding member of the Peace Pledge Union.[6] Jameson was a socialist in the 1930s;[7] although the outbreak of the Second World War caused her to recant her pacifism and later adopt anti-Communist views. However, she remained a supporter of the Labour Party.[7] In addition to her novels, Jameson wrote three autobiographies.

Jameson wrote several science fiction novels. In the Second Year (1936) is a dystopia set in a fascist Britain.[8][9] Then We Shall Hear Singing describes a near-future invasion by the Nazis of an imaginary country.[10]

Her most controversial work was Modern Drama in Europe (1920) a critical analysis of the progress made in drama in the first part of the twentieth century. Though most of her commentaries are highly critical and sometimes malicious, her boldness reaches its peak when she asserts that William Butler Yeats "represents the last state in symbolic imbecility".[11]

Jameson's collection of novellas, Women Against Men, was admired by The Times reviewer, Harold Strauss, who stated, "So completely is she the master of her art, so instinctively the craftsman, so superlatively the selective artist, that a restrained evaluation of her work is difficult for a student of the novel."[12] Jameson wrote the introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank[13]

Jameson's novel Last Score was praised by Ben Ray Redman in the Saturday Review of Literature. Redman described Last Score as "one of Storm Jameson's best" and stated "it is the complex web of human relationships that give this novel its breadth and depth".[14]

A biography by Jennifer Birkett, professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009. A second biography, Elizabeth Maslen's Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography, was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press.

The rebuilt Charles Morris Halls of the University of Leeds now have a building named after her, Storm Jameson Court.

• LASSNER, Phyllis, '"On the Point of a Journey" : Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bottome, and the Novel of Women's Political Psychology' in Shuttleworth, Antony (ed.), And in our time : vision, revision, and British writing of the 1930s (Lewisburg (PA) and London: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 115–32. ISBN 0-8387-5518-6

• Works by or about Storm Jameson at Internet Archive