Defending Europe’s Others

Abstract

Like Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bottome (1882–1963) created a series of fictions that analyse Britain’s historic relationship to Europe. A prolific and popular author in her own day, Bottome combined her interest in the psychology of social responsibility and women’s self-determination in several novels, including the 1934 Private Worlds, whose central character is a woman psychologist torn between the professional pressures of forging a place in a male-dominated hospital, her work with patients, and her love for a male colleague. Bottome also lectured and wrote about international relations and political responsibility from the perspective of having lived in Vienna in the early twenties and then in Munich from 1931 to 1933. Her European fiction was based on her experiences there and the force of her social and political involvement led her to create plots that predict the fate of European civilization through the plight of its Jews. She and her husband, Ernan Forbes Dennis, a British passport officer, left Munich in May 1933, ‘when it was no longer possible to live there without witnessing the cruel persecution of our Jewish friends, or ourselves refusing to make terms, however passively, with the controlling gangsters’.¹