Experiences of a lady worker: class, gender, and labor in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)

TY - JOUR

T1 - Experiences of a lady worker

T2 - class, gender, and labor in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)

AU - Jones, Clara

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - Sylvia Townsend Warner took rather a dim view of her first piece of published writing, an account of working in a munitions factory published in Blackwood's Magazine in February 1916. Looking back in 1939, she expressed not only aesthetic but also political distaste for the article. It was “youthfully precious” and written by a lady worker unwittingly co–opted into a scheme “devised to avoid the payment of overtime rates to the regular workers.” This article scrutinizes Warner's Blackwood's article, situating it in the context of contemporary debates about women's war work and considering how Warner's experiences of factory work informed her early thinking about the intersections of labor, class, and gender. These are themes that co–animate Warner's work of the 1920s and the second half of the article offers a reading of her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926).

AB - Sylvia Townsend Warner took rather a dim view of her first piece of published writing, an account of working in a munitions factory published in Blackwood's Magazine in February 1916. Looking back in 1939, she expressed not only aesthetic but also political distaste for the article. It was “youthfully precious” and written by a lady worker unwittingly co–opted into a scheme “devised to avoid the payment of overtime rates to the regular workers.” This article scrutinizes Warner's Blackwood's article, situating it in the context of contemporary debates about women's war work and considering how Warner's experiences of factory work informed her early thinking about the intersections of labor, class, and gender. These are themes that co–animate Warner's work of the 1920s and the second half of the article offers a reading of her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926).

KW - class

KW - gender; labour

KW - Sylvia Townsend Warner

KW - women's writing

KW - World War One

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85173085116&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/24692921.2023.2257347

DO - 10.1080/24692921.2023.2257347

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85173085116

SN - 2469-2921

VL - 7

SP - 1

EP - 16

JO - Feminist Modernist Studies

JF - Feminist Modernist Studies

IS - 1

ER -