Storm Jameson - women writers to put back on the bookshelf
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2020
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is a writer's duty? Katie Cooper considers Storm Jameson's campaigning for refugees, her 1940 appeal To the Conscience of the World and why her fiction fell out of favour but is now seeing a revival of interest.
Born in Yorkshire in 1891, she wrote war novels and speculative fiction, collections of criticism - including an analysis of modern drama in Europe, the introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank and a host of novels set in European countries. During the Second World War years she was head of PEN, the association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote literature and intellectual co-operation.
Katie Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. Her book, War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson, is published April 2020.
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.4 | Hello, I'm Claire Walker Gore. |
| 0:39.9 | Thanks for downloading this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, which is part of a short |
| 0:44.5 | series looking at women writers to put back on the bookshelves. |
| 0:48.6 | Katie Cooper is a new generation thinker on a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and |
| 0:53.2 | Humanities Research Council to turn academic |
| 0:55.7 | research into radio programmes. She studies the Second World War period and writers' organisations |
| 1:00.8 | at the University of East Anglia. Her essay looks at the career of Storm Jameson. |
| 1:05.9 | I want you to imagine that terrible, humiliating professional networking party you didn't want to be at, but felt curiously obliged to attend. |
| 1:15.6 | All of those people, all of those expectations. |
| 1:19.6 | Now, I want you to imagine that same scenario, in a large house in 1920s London. |
| 1:26.6 | The doorbell rings and another exalted guest weaves through the sea of literary bodies, |
| 1:31.9 | embroidered armchairs and scattered occasional tables across the crowded living room. |
| 1:37.5 | The poet, Walter Dillamere, stands in the corner, |
| 1:41.0 | listening intently to his hostess writer Naomi Royd Smith as she extols the virtues of her |
| 1:47.2 | increasingly popular Thursday night get-togethers. The throng increases as more and more members of |
| 1:53.9 | literary London arrive for coffee, chocolates and conversation. But one woman, pale, pensive, sits alone, praying to go unnoticed. |
| 2:05.9 | Young Margaret Storm Jameson is not enjoying this gathering, nor the literary connections it might offer her. |
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