The death of her husband devastated the queen. He had shown deep affection and commitment to his wife and children, and the images of happy nuclear family life circulating about the royal family were an accurate as well as a deliberate self-representation. While not attempting to dominate the queen, he took a close interest in the affairs of the state and often acted as her advisor and confidant.
CY
's small nuclear family was enclosed by an extended family. But during the summer of 1830 and the ensuing winter, one complete family unit of three cousins died one after the other.
Battiscombe, Georgina, and E. M. Delafield. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable and Company, 1943.
Her immediate, nuclear family was an enclave of agnosticism while her extended family was unanimously Anglican
—though not uniformly, since it was sharply divided between High and Low Church. Her memoirs emphasise the moral strength it took for her parents to be agnostics in such a context, and the fact that they were not dogmatic unbelievers but earnest seekers and strivers, with probably a greater scrupulosity of conscience and more consistent practice of charity and loving-kindness than their Christian relations.
Tweedsmuir, Susan. The Lilac and the Rose. G. Duckworth, 1952.
16
She herself, however, probably influenced by two devoutly religious grandmothers, chose Anglicanism during her childhood,
Tweedsmuir, Susan. The Lilac and the Rose. G. Duckworth, 1952.
85
was confirmed into the Church of England, and remained a steady Christian believer all her life, though without any dogmatic sectarianism.
Tweedsmuir, Susan. The Lilac and the Rose. G. Duckworth, 1952.
87
Timeline item
27 August 1883 The volcano Mount Krakatoa in the Indonesian...
The volcano Mount Krakatoa in the Indonesian archipelago erupted with a force equal to multiple nuclear explosions: the 40,000 people killed included thousands of victims of tidal waves in Hawaii; the ash propelled into the upper atmosphere affected the whole world.
Ahuja, Anjana, and Michael Binyon. “In thrall to the volcano”. Edmonton Journal, 21 May 2001, p. E7.
E7
Jablow, Valerie. “Big bang that brought death to 40,000 people”. Guardian Weekly, 17–23 Apr. 2003, p. 30.
SJ remained highly politically engaged as World War II ended. After stepping down as President of PEN's English Centre, she sat on the executive board of PEN International.36: 72 She protested against the bombing of Hiroshima in a letter to the Manchester Guardian. In her autobiography, as well as several times expressing her intense horror at the threat of nuclear war, she also comments that this threat provides an ironic, perhaps delirious outlet for psychological and creative release. Many people are competent to tell us what to do to survive. Only the artist—a class of persons which includes the man who set a pot of geraniums outside his hovel in the ruins of Warsaw—can tell us how, in what conditions, men can survive as human beings. . . . I had a feeling of exhilaration, even gaiety. Now that none of us is safe, we can really laugh, really mock our pedantic teachers, really live.551
Initially she was a researcher, preparing reports on periodical publications and selecting historical topics for other government departments. In 1944 she began writing for the British Ally (Britansky Soyuznik), a propaganda paper issued by the British government in Moscow (though she remained based in London). As a science editor, she wrote primarily on such issues as the use of insecticides in preventing the spread of typhus and, increasingly, on the development and use of bombs. Through this work she expanded her knowledge of nuclear armament, against which she soon began protesting.
Russell, Dora. The Tamarisk Tree 3 : Challenge to the Cold War. Virago, 1985.
This novel and A Man of His Time are populated by the descendents of characters from Inheritance. Jonathon Oldroyd (a professor at a northern university and son of the David Oldroyd whose thoughts closed the original Inheritance) comments on the crass commercial proceedings of Chuff Morcar, whose forebears succeeded his own as proprietors of the mill. Chuff grew up in racist South Africa, while Jonathon holds anti-nuclear, anti-Vietnam political opinions. A student radical named Mellor inherits a family tradition reaching back through the Chartists
to the Luddites
.
DW
published another public-issue novel, Forty Years On, set in a post-nuclear-war Isle of Ely, which is again, as it was before the seventeenth-century drainage works, cut off by water from the rest of the country.
NM
was involved in pacifist and later in anti-nuclear politics, participating in the Authors' World Peace Appeal
during the Cold War in the 1950s, and heading political demonstrations against NATO
installations in Strathclyde in the early 1960s. She became active in FREEZE
, an international organisation lobbying governments against making a first strike, and lent support to the women at Greenham Common protesting against placement of Cruise missiles on British soil.
Benton, Jill. Naomi Mitchison: A Biography. Pandora, 1992.
MB
, who collaborated with her first husband, Sydney
, in the mid twentieth century on numerous plays (the more than fifty which preceded the Second World War included two volumes of one-acters with all-female casts) and some film scripts, was also a remarkably versatile author on her own account. She was a solo scriptwriter and dramatist, a novelist (notable for the satirical, feminist, post-nuclear fantasy The Big Switch), autobiographer, biographer, and feminist publisher and editor. She has another claim to fame in being one of the first British women to direct films.
Numbers of works ascribed to her vary widely. The front of her autobiography lists, as well as nondramatic prose works and two solo plays, six plays or collections and fourteen screenplays co-authored with Sydney, and fourteen films directed by herself. The co-authored writings certainly, and probably other categories, are selected lists.
PF
had a dazzling success with her first novel in 1927. She went on to publish more than thirty novels, as well as plays for stage and radio, short stories, autobiography, and an important anti-nuclear pamphlet. Despite several Virago
reprints, she has not received the critical attention she deserves.
ML
, a cultural force in twentieth-century Britain, published six novels, four biographies (one on multiple subjects), an anti-nuclear play, a collection of children's stories, three quasi-scientific investigations into secular and religious experiences, and various short stories, including a ghost story and an anti-nuclear fiction. She also edited various collections: poetry, children's stories, and essays on Charlotte Yonge
. Her articles and book reviews appeared in the Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She also wrote three film scripts, co-authored a television series, and made a substantial contribution of quotations for the Oxford English Dictionary. ML
's novels address class issues and gender barriers, often satirically. They reflect the political, social, and economic anxieties and tensions felt in England during the Second World War and the Cold War. A self-professed atheist, ML wrote secular studies of ecstatic experiences.
Other places where she lived with her nuclear family, like a rented house in Hertfordshire which was called The Cottage (although it had six bedrooms and a staff also of six), could not compare with Beckton. When the Athill finances crashed, the Carrs offered them a home at the Manor Farm at Ditchingham. This meant that their father, now working in business, had to live in lodgings during the week, but the children loved the life of a working farm.
Athill, Diana. Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill. Granta, 2009.
UKLG
was opposed to nuclear armament and to the American war in Vietnam. In Portland, Oregon during the 1960s she helped organize and participate in non-violent demonstrations for these two causes: there was a peace movement, and I was in it. In London at the end of that decade, with the war generating new horrors (forests and fields hit with defoliants, civilians bombed), Le Guin had less of an outlet for her activism, and began to broaden her opposition from one particular war to a whole mind-set of domination.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night. Putnam, 1979.
PDJ
did two kinds of first-hand research for this novel: into law practice (months spent in The Old Bailey
, on the phone to barristers, and having coffee with judges) and into the running of nuclear facilities (days with staff at Sizewell B
to get an idea about work practice and the hierarchy of power).
Ashby, Melanie. “P. D. James Talks to Melanie Ashby”. Mslexia, Vol.
In this book the element of science fiction already present in Out has become dominant. Written entirely in dialogue and transcripts of conversations, the story often uses tag-names to encode its sentences or phrases in a manner imitative of electronic encoding. Fourteen-year-old twins Jip (John Ivor Paul) and Zab (Isabel Paula Kate) begin to tell their story in Germany, where they have been sent, away from an imaginary place called Carn Tregean in Cornwall, England. There, two years before, they discovered a sentient, radioactive, computer-stone from a silicon civilization,
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Invisible Author: Last Essays. Ohio State University Press, 2002.
18
which they named Xorandor. They then saved the day by neutralizing Xorandor's offspring [who], because of a programming defect defined as a syntax error, turns terrorist . . . and threatens to turn into a nuclear bomb.
qtd. in
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
The twins find the process of narrating difficult because they live in a society that has made literature and philosophy obsolete fields of study. Speaking (in their author's later words) a slang based on electronic and computer words (e.g., diodic for super),
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Invisible Author: Last Essays. Ohio State University Press, 2002.
18
they quickly learn that storytelling (dictating into a pocket computer) is fraught with ambiguities and tensions from competing voices. Jip, who wants to summarize everything, despairs that it seems harder to tell a story, even [their] own than to make up the most complex program.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Xorandor. Carcanet, 1986.
8
Zab, the more thoughtful twin, urges him to consider that If the storytellers are characters THEN their confusion is part of their characters ENDIF. Inversely IF the characters are the storytellers THEN the confusion is part of the story ENDIF.
BR
issued I Sent a Letter to My Love, which, like her first published novel, analyses love-hate relations within the nuclear family.
The title comes from a rhyme chanted during a traditional children's game.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1976
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Her parents belonged to the educated, professional middle class, and were practising Christians within the Church of England
, where (even to a teenager beginning to experience doubts) the services were beautiful with candlelight and music, incense and ceremony and stained glass, the incomparable rhythms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.
qtd. in
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.
77
DL
was also exposed to Judaism
as a child. As an adult she formally converted to Christianity
in 1984 and to Catholicism
in 1990. She had early experience of various left-wing causes: seeing her father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini
's invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soapboxes protesting Britain's lack of support for Spain; my mother canvassing long before those events for the League of Nations Union
; and all three of them working on behalf of German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards.
qtd. in
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.
78
She herself began (unknown to her family) selling the Communist Daily Worker door to door at only about eleven.
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.
78
She grew up to be a committed internationalist, anti-war, anti-nuclear, and environmentalist campaigner.
Set in a seaside village in West Wales, it has Miss Pink visiting an old friend (also an old man) who has recently crossed swords with the Atomic Energy Authority
and prevented the building of a nuclear reactor, and who now believes that somebody is trying to kill him.
ML
perceived a connection between two forces which she passionately opposed: the political colonialism which exerts dominion under the pretext of guiding backward nations towards independence, and the gender colonialism which denies women autonomous control of their own lives on grounds of their lesser capacity. Her daughter defined the political issues that most concerned her as nuclear disarmament, pollution and the environment, pro-choice abortion legislation.
Stovel, Nora Foster. Divining Margaret Laurence. A Study of Her Complete Writings. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.
304
She might have added the battle against censorship in which Laurence somewhat reluctantly involved herself after The Diviners was banned by Ontario highschools.
Laurence, Margaret. Dance on the Earth: A Memoir. McClelland and Stewart, 1989.
The novelist John Fowles
, also a curator of the local museum at Lyme Regis, offered historical advice. The play developed from a poem he showed AJ
about about the role women played in the English Civil War siege of Lyme in 1644. The poem, entitled Joanereidos: or, Feminine Valour: Eminently Discovered in Westerne Women, was written and published by James Strong
, a local vicar, in 1645, to celebrate the fighting skills of women on the parliamentary side. It was mercilessly lampooned by the Royalists. AJ
saw a parallel between the townswomen's courage and endurance and that of the women encamped at Greenham Common to protest against the presence of nuclear bombers.