Abstract
This quotation from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Why Art To-Day Follows Politics’ (1936) was originally about novelists of the Left. It is equally applicable to the authors this book is about: John Buchan (1875–1940), Dornford Yates (1885–1960), and Angela Thirkell (1890–1961). They were politically and socially conservative but, as Woolf pointed out, it is how writers used their politics in their art that matters. She went on to say of the creative artist that ‘society is not only his paymaster but his patron’.2 I use her observations to shape my enquiry: what popular conservative and best-selling British fiction of the twentieth century said to its readers, and how we can understand the messages transmitted through this very popular fiction by Buchan, Yates and Thirkell.
That the writer is interested in politics needs no saying. Every publisher’s list, almost every book that is now issued, brings proof of the fact. […] The poet introduces Communism or Fascism into his lyrics; the novelist turns from the private lives of his characters to their social surroundings and their political opinions.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Virginia Woolf, ‘Why Art To-Day Follows Politics’ (1936), in Stuart N Clarke (ed.) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, 1933–1941, and Additional Essays 1906–1924 (London: The Hogarth Press, 2011), 75–9, 75.
William Plomer, ‘Fiction: A Prince of the Captivity’, The Spectator, 151 (21 July 1933), 94.
The Bookman, LXXXVI: 513 (June 1934), back cover.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 12.
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 18.
William Vivian Butler, The Durable Desperadoes: A Critical Study of some Enduring Heroes (London: Macmillan, 1973), 17.
Kate Macdonald, John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009).
Jill N Levin, The ‘Land of Lost Content’: Sex, Art and Class in the Novels of Angela Thirkell, 1933–1960, MA thesis, Washington University, St Louis, 1986, 11–12. The Leavis quote is from Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 47.
Margot Strickland, Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1977), 142, 150.
Diana Trilling, Reviewing the Forties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978), 12.
Thomas J Roberts, An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 11, 15.
David Smith, Socialist Propaganda in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (London: Macmillan, 1978), 2.
Hans Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 15.
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 6.
George Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 1977), 84.
Terence Rodgers, ‘The Right Book Club: Text wars, modernity and cultural politics in the 1930s’, Literature and History, 12:2 (2003), 1–15, 2.
A J Smithers, Dornford Yates: A Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), 96.
Mary Grover, The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 27.
Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996), 22–3, 47.
Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (London: Berg, 1993), 69.
Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11.
Kate Macdonald, ‘Introduction: Identifying the Middlebrow, the Masculine and Mr Miniver’, in Kate Macdonald (ed.) The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880– 1950: What Mr Miniver Read (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–23, 11.
Richard Usborne, Clubland Heroes (1953) (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 3.
Ann Rea, ‘The collaborator, the tyrant and the resistance: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and middlebrow England in the Second World War’, in Kate Macdonald (ed.) The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 177–96, 190.
Dornford Yates, ‘How Will Noggin was fooled, and Berry rode forth against his will’ (1919), in Berry & Co (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1920), 9–33, 31–2.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21.
Ted Bogacz, ‘“A tyranny of words”: Language, poetry and antimodernism in England in the First World War’, The Journal of Modern History, 58:3 (1986), 643–68, 645.
Dornford Yates, Berry & Co (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1920), 118–19.
Dornford Yates, Anthony Lyveden (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1921), 46–7.
Dornford Yates, The Stolen March (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1930), 29.
Dornford Yates, Blood Royal (1929) (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941), 79.
Dornford Yates, Storm Music (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1934), 96; Gale Warning (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1939), 35, 149.
Robert Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 171.
John Buchan, Huntingtower (1922) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 107.
John Buchan, John Macnab (1925) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 209–10.
Angela Thirkell, Love Among the Ruins (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), 363.
Angela Thirkell, Marling Hall (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1942), 151–2.
See Macdonald 2009, 11–14, and the bibliography, for an extensive discussion of critical writing on Buchan; also Kate Macdonald (ed.) Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009);
Nathan Waddell, Modern John Buchan: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009);
Kate Macdonald, ‘The diversification of Thomas Nelson: John Buchan and the Nelson archive, 1909–1911’, Publishing History, 65 (2009), 71–96;
Kate Macdonald, ‘John Buchan’s breakthrough: The conjunction of experience, markets and forms that made The Thirty-Nine Steps’, Publishing History, 68 (2010), 25–106;
Kate Macdonald, ‘Thomas Nelson & Sons and John Buchan: Mutual marketing in the publisher’s series’, in John Spiers (ed.) The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, vol. 1, Authors, Publishers, and the Shaping of Taste (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 156–70;
Kate Macdonald and Nathan Waddell (eds) John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013).
Arthur C Turner, John Buchan: A Biography (Toronto: Macmillan, 1949);
Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965);
Martin Green, A Biography of John Buchan and his Sister Anna: The Personal Background of their Literary Work (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990);
Andrew Lownie, The Presbyterian Cavalier: John Buchan (London: Constable & Co, 1995);
David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1975).
Archibald Hanna, John Buchan 1875–1940: A Bibliography (Hamden: Shoestring Press, 1953);
Robert Blanchard, The First Editions of John Buchan: A Collector’s Bibliography (Hamden: Archon, 1981);
Kenneth Hillier (ed.) The First Editions of John Buchan: An Illustrated Collector’s Bibliography (Clapton-in-Gordano: Avonworld, 2009). See also Macdonald 2010, 25–106, for the new amalgamated bibliography of Buchan’s writing 1894–1915. A recent PhD thesis by Roger Clarke (University of the West of England, 2015) offers a bibliography of Buchan’s journalism.
Yates himself objected to Usborne linking his writing to Buchan’s novels, pointing out that his style was closer to that of Anthony Hope. Dornford Yates, B-Berry and I Look Back (London: Ward Lock, 1958), 147–8.
A survey I conducted on women readers of Buchan concluded that they were in a distinct minority, but that most had discovered Buchan’s fiction while at school or from their parents: Kate Macdonald, ‘Women readers of John Buchan’, The John Buchan Journal, 23 (2000), 24–31.
The first to appear was the fourth Hannay adventure, The Three Hostages (1923). In 1956 eight further titles were published: Greenmantle (1916, the second Hannay novel); Huntingtower (1922, the first of the Dickson McCunn trilogy); The House of the Four Winds (1935, the last Dickson McCunn novel); The Island of Sheep (1936, the last Hannay novel); Mr Standfast (1919, the third Hannay novel); The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915, the first Hannay novel); John Macnab (1924, a Leithen novel); and Castle Gay (1930, the second McCunn novel). Two further Buchan titles, both historical novels from the 1930s, were reprinted in 1961 and 1963. See also Bill Schwartz on Buchan’s republication by Penguin, in ‘The romance of the veld’, in Andrew Bosco and Alex May (eds) The Round Table: The Empire/Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1997), 65–125.
Clive Bloom, Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (London: Macmillan, 1996), 178.
David Pryce-Jones, ‘Towards the Cocktail Party’, in Michael Sissons and Philip French (eds) Age of Austerity 1945–1951: The Conservatism of Post-War Writing (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963), 215–39;
D J Taylor, After the War: The Novel and English Society since 1945 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 11–13;
Jenny Hartley, Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (London: Virago, 1997), 36, 75.
Laura Roberts Collins, English Country Life in the Barsetshire Novels of Angela Thirkell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).
Rachel Mather, The Heirs of Jane Austen: Twentieth-Century Writers of the Comedy of Manners (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 67–95.
Penelope Fritzer, Ethnicity and Gender in the Barsetshire Novels of Angela Thirkell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 1999;
Penelope Fritzer, Aesthetics and Nostalgia in the Barsetshire Novels of Angela Thirkell (Angela Thirkell Society of North America, 2009).
Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, Narrative Settlements: Geographies of British Women’s Fiction Between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Kate Macdonald
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Macdonald, K. (2015). Introduction: Politics and Pleasure in Language. In: Novelists Against Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-45772-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-45772-1_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56790-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-45772-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)