Feeling “The High-voltage Current of the General Pass”: Experiments in Subjectivity in British Women’s Fiction in the Wake of World War II

This chapter focuses on a selection of formally innovative novels written by British women writers during or immediately following World War II, aiming to contribute to recent work concerned with nuancing accounts of mid-twentieth century literature. Focusing in particular on the differing ways in which women authors negotiated the tension between the particular and the general in their works, this chapter puts forward a reading of experimental women’s fiction in the wake of the war as a counter example to Cyril Connolly’s assertion in 1947 that “such a thing as avant-garde has ceased to exist”. Drawing on works ranging from Storm Jameson’s The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945), Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House (1947/48) to Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949) and Rosamond Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove (1953), it argues that these novels, rather than constituting a morally suspect solipsism as some reviews suggested, are concerned with exploring interrelationships between external forces of society and internal states of mind.