Storm Jameson

Margaret Ethel Storm Jameson[1] (8 January 1891 – 30 September 1986) was an English journalist and author, known for her novels and reviews.[2]

1950s Penguin photograph of Storm Jameson

Life and career

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.

Works

Mary Hervey Russell books

  • Company Parade (1934) The Mirror in Darkness I
  • Love in Winter (1935) The Mirror in Darkness II
  • None Turn Back (1936) The Mirror in Darkness III
  • The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945)
  • Before the Crossing (1947)
  • The Black Laurel (1947)

Triumph of Time books

  • The Lovely Ship (1927) The Triumph of Time I
  • The Voyage Home (1930) The Triumph of Time II
  • A Richer Dust (1931) The Triumph of Time III
  • The Triumph of Time (three volumes in one) (1932)

Other fiction

  • The Pot Boils (1919)
  • The Happy Highways (1920)
  • The Clash (1922)
  • Lady Susan and Life: An Indiscretion (1923)
  • The Pitiful Wife (1923)
  • Three Kingdoms (1926)
  • Farewell to Youth (1928)
  • Full Circle: A Play in One Act (1928) drama
  • The Single Heart (1932) novella
  • That Was Yesterday (1932)
  • Women Against Men (1933) three novellas
  • A Day Off (1933) novella
  • In the Second Year (1936)
  • The Moon is Making (1937)
  • Delicate Monster (1937)
  • Loving Memory (1937) novel under the pseudonym James Hill
  • The World Ends (1937) novel under the pseudonym William Lamb
  • Here Comes a Candle (1938)
  • No Victory For the Soldier (1938) novel under the pseudonym James Hill
  • Farewell Night, Welcome Day (1939) (published in the United States as The Captain's Wife)[15]
  • Cousin Honoré (1940)
  • Europe to Let (1940)
  • The Fort (1941)
  • Then We Shall Hear Singing: A Fantasy in C Major (1942)
  • Cloudless May (1943)
  • The Other Side (1946)
  • The Moment Of Truth (1949)
  • The Green Man (1952)
  • The Hidden River (1955)
  • The Intruder (1956)
  • A Cup of Tea for Mr. Thorgill (1957)
  • A Ulysses Too Many (1958)
  • A Day Off (1959) short novels, stories
  • Last Score, or the Private Life of Sir Richard Ormston (1961)
  • The Road from the Monument (1962)
  • A Month Soon Goes (1962)
  • The Aristide Case (1964)
  • The Early Life of Stephen Hind (1966)
  • The White Crow (1968)
  • There Will Be A Short Interval (1973)

Non-fiction

  • Modern Drama in Europe (1920) criticism
  • The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson (1929) criticism
  • The Decline of Merry England (1930) history
  • The Novel in Contemporary Life (1938) critical essay
  • No Time Like the Present (1933) autobiography
  • Challenge to Death (1935) editor, essays
  • The Soul of Man in an Age of Leisure (1935) pamphlet
  • Civil Journey (1939) essays
  • The End of This War (1941) essay
  • London Calling : A Salute to America (1942) editor, short stories
  • The Writer's Situation (1950) essays
  • Morley Roberts: The Last Eminent Victorian (1961) biography
  • Journey from the North (Volume 1 – 1969) (Volume 2 – 1970) autobiography
  • Parthian Words (1970) criticism
  • Speaking of Stendhal (1979) criticism

Secondary literature

  • 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

References

  1. "Jameson, Margaret Ethel [Storm] (1891–1986), novelist | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/39834. Retrieved 19 February 2020. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. Bitker, Marjorie M. (3 April 1963). "No Ivory Tower for Storm Jameson". The Milwaukee Journal. Archived from the original on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 25 December 2010.
  3. "Jameson, Margaret Ethel [Storm] (1891–1986), novelist | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/39834. Retrieved 19 February 2020. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. http://www.flowergatehaydnwilliamscentre.org.uk/page12.html
  5. "Spartacus Educational Website".
  6. Ceadel, Martin, Semi-Detached Idealists:The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945. Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0199241171 (p. 334)
  7. Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women writers of the 1930s : The Dangerous Flood of History. Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0415068924 (p. 25).
  8. "Anti-fascist SF" in Mark Bould, Sherryl Vint, (2011) The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. Routledge, ISBN 0415435714 (p.23).
  9. "Books: In England, Too". Time. 17 February 1936.
  10. Karen Schneider, Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War . University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ISBN 0813119804, (p. 186).
  11. Modern Drama in Europe: 207
  12. "Books: New & Noteworthy" by Patricia T. O'Conner. The New York Times, 12 January 1986.
  13. "The diary from the annexe", Mary Stocks, The Guardian, 28 April 2008 (Reprint from 28 April 1952).
  14. Ben Ray Redman, " Terroristic Colonials" The Saturday Review, 17 June 1961 (p. 24)
  15. Maslen, Elizabeth. (5 September 2014). Life in the writings of Storm Jameson : a biography. Evanston, Illinois. p. 217. ISBN 978-0-8101-2979-5. OCLC 874835563.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.