Women Writers - Showcase Display

‘Being single, and having some money, and having the time – having no men, you see’ was how the writer Ivy Compton-Burnett rather bluntly explained why so many women were writing fiction after the First World War. The photographic portraits in this display were made in the period 1920 to 1960 when the majority of fiction published was written by women. This phenomenon can also be explained by increased access to formal education and society’s growing acceptance of the working woman.

The writers of this new wave of women’s fiction were very professional and extraordinarily prolific – by the age of thirty-two Pamela Frankau had published twenty books and Enid Blyton could produce a children’s book in five working days. The popular romance writer Ruby Ayres publicly admitted that she herself ‘wrote for money’. In 1955 she told the Daily Mail about her creative process; ‘First I fix the price, then I fix the title, then I write the book’, and she could write as much as 20,000 words a day. Fortunately, this level of output was matched by a mostly female readership, hungry for new novels. They would pick up several books a week at private lending libraries like W.H. Smith’s and Boot’s, suppliers of popular literature on subscription until the late 1960s.

Virginia Woolf believed that women’s fiction after the First World War was ‘far more genuine and far more interesting to-day than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago’. The diversity of women writers during the next four decades is remarkable.

This display includes portraits of 24 children’s writers, crime and romance writers including Dorothy L. Sayers and Dame Barbara Cartland, novelists once described as ‘middle-brow’ like Rosamund Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen, whose books combine middle-class domesticity with sophistication, and writers like Radclyffe Hall who tackled issues of female sexuality, and faced scandal. The photographers featured in this collection include Paul Tanqueray, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray and Bill Brandt, and range from studio portraits to images of the writer at work.

On this unique new display of portraits, Curator Rosie Broadley says: ‘These portraits illustrate a fascinating period when the field of fiction writing was dominated by women. In a display that includes some rarely seen portraits, unfamiliar faces are connected with many well-loved books.’

9 December 2006 – 17 June 2007
Room 31 - 20th Century Galleries - Showcase display

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