Kirjahaku

This new edition of Elizabeth Maslen's successful study covers the full range of Doris Lessing's work and explores in detail both its form and content. From The Grass is Singing (1950) through to Alfred and Emily (2008) her main concerns are shown to have a remarkable continuity, both in her commitment to political and cultural issues and in her explorations of inner space. Her experiments with form are closely analysed, and her bold exposure of jargon, cliché, and the manipulative power of language is demonstrated. While she can be seen as part of the great diasporaic influx that followed World War Two her experimentations with form blend in with the explorations of realism taking place in much British fiction from the early years of the twentieth century. This is a concise, accessible, but scholarly book, offering both perceptive critical insights and a valuable up-to-date bibliography.

Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986) is primarily known as a compelling essayist; her stature as a novelist and champion of the dispossessed is largely forgotten. In Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson, Elizabeth Maslen reveals a figure who held her own beside fellow British women writers, including Virginia Woolf; anticipated the Angry Young Women, such as Doris Lessing; and was an early champion of such European writers as Arthur Koestler and Czeslaw Milosz.Jameson was a complex character whose politics were grounded in social justice; she was passionately antifascist - her novel In the Second Year (1936) raised the alarm about Nazism - but always wary of communism. An eloquent polemicist, Jameson was, as president of the British P.E.N. during the 1930s and 1940s, of invaluable assistance to refugee writers.Elizabeth Maslen's biography introduces a true twentieth century hedgehog, whose essays and subtly experimental fiction were admired in Europe and the States.