Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986) is primarily known as a compelling essayist; her stature as a novelist and champion of the dispossessed is largely forgotten. In Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson, Elizabeth Maslen reveals a figure who held her own beside fellow British women writers, including Virginia Woolf; anticipated the Angry Young Women, such as Doris Lessing; and was an early champion of such European writers as Arthur Koestler and Czesław Miłosz.Jameson was a complex character whose politics were grounded in social justice; she was passionately antifascist - her novel In the Second Year (1936) raised the alarm about Nazism - but always wary of communism. An eloquent polemicist, Jameson was, as president of the British P.E.N. during the 1930s and 1940s, of invaluable assistance to refugee writers.Elizabeth Maslen's biography introduces a true twentieth century hedgehog, whose essays and subtly experimental fiction were admired in Europe and the States.
