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Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Twentieth-Century British Fiction. Judy Suh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ix + 211pp.
Judy Suh's Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Twentieth-Century British Fiction is part of what promises to be a new wave of studies in modernist women's literature. The title of the book is misleading, for there is no mention of gender or sex or even the "middlebrow novel" which are its real subjects. Suh's study begins with Wyndham Lewis, the lone male in the study, then moves through a range of little discussed 1930s female writers-Olive Hawks, Phyllis Bottome, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen-and ends with Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Virginia Woolf is placed in this context as well and the study begs the question of Woolfs conscious participation in and appropriation of cultural currents and genres beyond the "high modernism" of her earlier novels.
Fascism and Anti-Fascism interprets the political significance of British middlebrow fiction during the rise and fall of fascism from the 1930s to the 1960s. It analyzes the way spy narratives, domestic novels, family sagas, country house fiction, and adolescent bildungsromane not only attempt fascist consensus-building but also defy the assumption that middlebrow novels lack political implications. Suh extends the line of inquiry initiated by such critics as Gill Plain, Phyllis Lassner, Maroula Joannou, and Laura Frost, whose work has provided insight into underdiscussed women's writing of the 1930s and 1940s. Suh argues that many women's novels during these decades draw on familiar narrative elements, elements that help to "maintain or dismantle British fascism's self-representation as a nationalpopular movement" (2). Suh's detailed argument points to the ways "middlebrow literature comfortably dwells in familiar narratives, characters, and settings to plant within them fascist and anti-fascist cultural strains" (2). The novels she discusses are complicated by the emphasis on their political and polemic nature.
Suh opens her study with a recalibration of Wyndham Lewis's fascist sympathies and reformed anti-fascism. Though she could have developed her reasons and the implications of using Lewis's novel as a starting point, she does point to how his work presents a unique opportunity to explore facets of the "British fascist imagination" (16) in the domestic novel. Lewis's The Revenge for Love (1937)...