This short audiobook offers the dispassionate but sharp-tongued comments
on the novel, by an old fiction hand, a personal exercise of taste and
judgment, backed by a life interest in the history and methods of
literary criticism. It reviews the evergreen question of the death of
the novel, so often and confidently announced; the difficulties,
peculiar to our nihilistic and often brutal age, that press on the
contemporary novelist; the effect on him and his work of the
technological revolution; his increasing diffidence in face of the
overwhelming prestige of science in our day; the changing language of
fiction; the novel as an art form; the nouveau roman, and its most
sophisticated and more esoteric cousin, the nouvelle critique; the
eruption into common daylight of pornographic fiction; the use and
misuse of censorship. It attempts to decide whether the traditional or
classic novel has a future and what sort of future. Though it may offend
a great many solemn persons it has not been written to give offence, but
in a serious effort to reach some positive conclusions about the health,
the moral and aesthetic worth, of the novel in a day when our minds are,
as never before, at the mercy of their worst dreams.
Storm Jameson (1891- 1986) born to a North Yorkshire family of
shipbuilders. Jameson's fiery mother, who bore three girls, encouraged
Storm (christened Margaret Storm) to pursue an academic education. After
being taught privately and at Scarborough municipal school she won one
of three county scholarships which enabled her to read English
Literature at Leeds University. She then went on to complete an MA in
European Drama at King's College London. During her career Jameson wrote
45 novels, numerous pamphlets, essays, and reviews, in an effort to make
money. Her personal life suffered, and her first marriage to
schoolmaster Charles Douglas Clarke was an unhappy one. After they
divorced in 1925, Jameson went on to marry Guy Chapman, a fellow author,
and remained with him despite her apparent rejection of normal domestic
life. Storm Jameson was always politically active, helping to publish a
Marxist journal in the British section of the International Union of
Revolutionary Writers in 1934 and attending anti-fascist rallies.
