Alison Light – Inside History

Alison Light is a writer and Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College London; she is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh University and a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of a number of books, including Common People: The History of an English Family (Penguin 2014), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, and her most recent, A Radical Romance, which won the 2020 PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

• Series Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Reading Oneself Backwards　　 Part I From Fiction to Nation1. ‘Returning to Manderley’: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class 2. Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and Racism 3. Young Bess: Historical Novels and Growing Up 4. Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice Part II Short Cuts5. The Vampire and the Dog: Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest　 6. Women Writers and Conservative Sensibilities7. Against Empathy8. The Mighty Mongrel: on Biography9. Hitchcock’s Rebecca: A Woman’s Film?10. Re-reading Great Expectations11. The Figure of the Servant12. Experiments in Memoir-writingPart III Writing Lives13. A Woolf in Dog’s Clothing: Flush　　 14. Fascism, Fear and Feminism: Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas15. Addicted to Diaries: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt16. Writing the Lives of ‘Common People’: Reflections on the Idea of Obscurity　 Index

[Alison Light - Inside History] enthusiastically and eloquently moves in many different directions. It is a work of fine writing as well as pioneering scholarship. Though an intensely personal writer, Light is always aware of her audience. She refuses to talk down to them and writes in a manner that is friendly, learned and accessible. She is one of the most human and humane writers of Modern British History at the moment and for that she richly deserves to have this collection of essays read widely by all those interested in British history, feminism and literature.