Rebel Writers: The Accidental Feminists Shelagh Delaney • Edna O’Brien • Lynne Reid Banks • Charlotte Bingham • Nell Dunn • Virginia Ironside • Margaret Forster
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Celia Brayfield is a multi-award-winning novelist, journalist and critic. She is the author of 9 novels ranging from modern social fiction to international bestsellers including Wild Weekend (2004) and Sunset (1999). She also teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Born in North London, Celia was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and briefly studied French language and literature at Grenoble University. She has one daughter and lives in Dorset.Writers who changed lives. <i>Rebel Writers </i>is a startling new approach to literary criticism - not just what was done, but why it had to be done - mingled with astute social history. All sorts of things we should know but don’t know about the sixties, all smoothly and elegantly written and as readable as any novel. Six writers to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, all in their own ways sowing the seeds of how we live today. Marvellously interesting!
- Fay Weldon,
Make this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it’s Oprah’s Book Club worthy.
Vice
Brayfield's equally illuminating book homes in on the late 1950s and early 1960s, revealing that (Shelagh) Delaney wasn't the only one showing that female experience was about more than just falling in love... Brayfield offers us perceptive analysis of the writing and ratifies these women's position in the canon in the process. Perfect companion volumes, <i>Tastes of Honey</i> and <i>Rebel Writers</i> make for entertaining, edifying and important reading.
Financial Times Weekend
'Make this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it’s Oprah’s Book Club worthy' Vice
In London in 1958, a play by a 19-year-old redefined women’s writing in Britain. It also began a movement that would change women’s lives forever. The play was A Taste of Honey and the author, Shelagh Delaney, was the first in a succession of young women who wrote about their lives with an honesty that dazzled the world. They rebelled against sexism, inequality and prejudice and in doing so challenged the existing definitions of what writing and writers should be. Bypassing the London cultural elite, their work reached audiences of millions around the world, paved the way for profound social changes and laid the foundations of second-wave feminism.
After Delaney came Edna O’Brien, Lynne Reid-Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Nell Dunn, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster; an extraordinarily disparate group who were united in their determination to shake the traditional concepts of womanhood in novels, films, television, essays and journalism. They were as angry as the Angry Young Men, but were also more constructive and proposed new ways to live and love in the future. They did not intend to become a literary movement but they did, inspiring other writers to follow. Not since the Brontës have a group of young women been so determined to tell the truth about what it is like to be a girl.
In this biographical study, the acclaimed author, Celia Brayfield, tells their story for the first time.
Introduction
Part one: Seven Writers
1. Innocence and Experience
2. A Man’s World: Sexism
3. Forbidden Kisses: Class
4. All False: Love
5. ‘I Wish I Had a Career’: Aspiration
6. The Great Unmentionable: Sex
7. Drowning in Delight: Motherhood
8. A Rotten Bargain: Marriage
9. Good Old John: Race
10. Before the Urban Family: Friendship
Part two: Out into the World
11. ‘Where is your Baby?’
12. Losing It at the Movies: Screen Adaptation
13. A Stain Upon Womanhood
14. The Angry Young Men: The Literary Movement That Never Was
15. Backwards in High Heels: Success And After
16. We Were Pioneers
Epilogue
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index