Justice for a forgotten woman of words
A contemporary of JB Priestley, little-known Yorkshire author Margaret Storm Jameson was born in Whitby in 1891.
Educated in Scarborough, she went on to study at Leeds University and King's College London, then worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She wrote 45 novels, as well as short stories, novellas, a play, numerous critical essays and an autobiography, and was a best-seller in her time. Many of her novels won awards, yet today, almost all her work is out of print.
Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French at Birmingham University, whose biography of Jameson was published in March this year, believes that she deserves much greater recognition.
Birkett, who was born and brought up in Armthorpe near Doncaster, first came across the author through her autobiography, Journey from the North, and found that Jameson's writing struck a chord with her.
"For me, as a Yorkshirewoman, her autobiography was fascinating because it allowed me to discover new things about the county I grew up in and about how people struggled through in different ways," she says.
"Whatever she wrote, whether it was fiction or non-fiction, she had a great deal of insight and packed so much in to her writing. It is very accessible, but she also tells you so much about what you want to know about people and places."
Birkett was also impressed by Jameson's work as a tireless political campaigner, fighting against injustice and for equality.
While at school in Scarborough, Jameson met two brothers, Sydney and Oswald Harland, who were to become life-long friends. They introduced her to Socialism and from that point onwards, she worked towards creating what she felt a just world should be. An early feminist, she was also involved in the Suffragette movement, but on her own terms.
"She was famous when she was a student at Leeds University for ending every discussion of the debating society with a cry of 'Votes for Women!' and she participated in a couple of Suffragette marches when she lived in London, but she was basically an independent-thinking woman."
Birkett describes Jameson as "an individualist with a very strong sense of community" and that this could be put down to her Yorkshire background and her "Congregationalist Church of England morality".
Her instinct to, as Birkett puts it, "think in collective terms" is reflected in her novels which hold up a mirror to the common experiences of her contemporaries. Her Mirror in Darkness trilogy depicted English society between the wars, while other novels focussed on the rise of fascism, the fall of France and the rebuilding of Europe after the war.
Jameson's life story spans almost the whole of the 20th century (she died in 1986) and she was witness to, and affected by, all its major events.
One of the surprising things that Birkett discovered while researching and writing her biography was a novel about the Spanish Civil war that Jameson had written in 1938 under the pseudonym of James Hill.
"The hero of No Victory for the Soldier is a modernist musician," explains Birkett. "The war comes into the last third of the book but the first two-thirds is about the hero's attempts to find new ways to write music.
"The received wisdom on Jameson is that she shunned modernism but this book confirmed a lot of things I had thought about her. Nobody guessed it was Jameson who wrote the book; it was quite different to her usual writing."
During the Second World War, Jameson was involved with the international writers' organisation PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists), becoming its president in 1939.
PEN was formed in 1921 with the aim to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere; it also fought for freedom of speech and campaigned on behalf of writers who were being denied that freedom. Jameson was involved in writing petitions for writers who were being persecuted, particularly in Nazi Germany.
She raised funds to help them to get visas and then, once they were in Britain, organised places for them to live and linked them up with editors, publishers and translators.
"Some of that experience went directly into her books," says Birkett. "One in particular, A Ulysses Too Many, was about being exiled and how exiles relate to their own country and their adopted land."
Jameson's extraordinary drive and energy meant that she achieved a huge amount in all the different areas in which she engaged in.
Birkett says: "I think she was disappointed towards the end of her life by the lack of recognition for her writing. There are a growing number of academics who are writing about her, but because her publishers let her books go out of print, they are quite hard to find."
Birkett says that having now studied Jameson's life and work in such depth what has struck her most is her subject's perseverance, determination and consistency of purpose. "I think the best of her writing is when she is writing against injustice and for fairness and equality. I hope that my biography will help to redress the injustice done to her. Her writing never got the recognition it deserves – it's time it did."
Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life, by Jennifer Birkett, is published by Oxford University Press, price 25.
Email to a friend
Print this page- Three-inch blanket of snow heading our way today
- Alan Shearer in list of favourites for Leeds and England jobs: Latest odds
- Barnsley’s Keith Hill invokes Fawlty Towers over link with Leeds job
- McCormack feels United search can be narrowed down
- Redfearn throws down gauntlet as queue builds at Elland Road
- Rival chips in with £500,000 to restore the original Harry Ramsden’s
- Visit from Princess as Serbian culture celebrated
- Was this woman on your train to Manchester Airport?
- SportsTalk: Leeds United’s manager search, Super League and Calcutta Cup
- Libraries aren’t like supermarkets, they are magical places where dreams begin
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Sunday 12 February 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 1 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 4 C to 8 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: West
