Introducing Lilo Linke and Hilary Newitt: Storm Jameson’s Anti-Fascist Collaborations in the 1930s

Abstract

This article examines Storm Jameson’s literary collaborations with other women writers in the 1930s, reading them as a mode of anti-fascist activism. Jameson collaborated with Lilo Linke on her 1934 memoir-travelogue, Tale Without End, and with Hilary Newitt on her 1937 sociological study, Women Must Choose, providing editorial assistance, access to publication and introductions to both texts. Through readings of Jameson’s introductions in relation to the texts they precede, I argue that Jameson promoted Linke’s and Newitt’s work to alert British women readers to the threat fascism posed to their freedom and persuade those readers to oppose it. I aim to locate these collaborations in the context of women’s anti-fascist activism from which they arose, while drawing attention to feminist literary exchanges that remain underexplored.

Keywords:

• Storm Jameson
• anti-fascism
• collaboration
• introductions
• women’s writing
• activism

Acknowledgements

Excerpts from letters from Storm Jameson to Hilary Newitt are reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the estate of Storm Jameson. I would like to thank the estate for granting this permission, as well as Ewa Delanowski at Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University, whose assistance with Hilary Newitt’s archive proved invaluable to my research for this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, ‘A Faith Worth Dying For: The Defence of Freedom’, an essay Jameson contributed to the liberal periodical, Fortnightly Review, in 1934.

2 Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) represented a growing threat in Britain. In 1934, the year Tale Without End was published, BUF membership reached 40,000 (Renton 2000: 16).

3 As June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton explain, the 1918 Representation of the People Act granted the vote only to those women who ‘were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5 or more, or graduates of British universities’ (Purvis and Holton 2000: 3–4). It wasn’t until 1928 that women over 21 were granted suffrage on equal terms to men.