Abstract
This chapter examines the gradual liberalisation of sex censorship in the post-war period and considers how this affected women’s ability to write about sex, desire and reproduction. The period begins with sex taking a prominent but safely enclosed position in women’s writing. It is, as Nancy Mitford’s Fanny comments in The Pursuit of Love (1945), ‘our great obsession’,1 but it is an obsession which remains couched in metaphor and humour. In the 1960s, after the watershed events of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial and the advent of the contraceptive pill, the sexual experiences of women begin to be fully and explicitly represented in women’s fiction. It is at this point that the literary landscape alters significantly not only in terms of what experiences women can represent but how they represent those experiences. Here the politics of sex and the politics of representation meet in a conscious and critical examination of the ‘nature’ of female sexuality and its place in print. Towards the end of the post-war period, from 1969 onwards, the focus shifts again and sex, desire and reproduction become differently implicated in a more comprehensive and nuanced representation of female experience in the late twentieth century.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels [1949] (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 18.
Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1980 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 136–7.
Esther Saxey, ‘Introduction’, in Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness [1928] (Ware: Wordsworth, 2014), p. xix.
Elizabeth Taylor, A View of the Harbour [1947] (London: Virago, 2013), pp. 37–8.
Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, & Contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 179.
Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek [1951] (London: Virago, 2009), p. 173.
Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove [1953] (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co, 1984), p. 155.
Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage [1954] (London: Flamingo, 2002), p. 43.
Clare Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750–2000 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 141.
Deborah Philips, Women’s Fiction: 1945–2005 (London & New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 38.
Margaret Drabble, The Millstone [1965] (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 20.
See Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood’s discussion of the novels in Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (London: Continuum, 1998), pp. 36–7.
Melissa Benn, ‘Middle-Class Mores’, New Statesman, 139.5020, 81–3 (2010), 81, Humanities International Complete, <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=athens&db=buh&AN=53875 73&2site=eds-live&authtype= ip,athens> [accessed 10 June 2015 ].
Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room [1960] (London: Vintage, 2004), pp. 32–3.
Andrew Rosen, The Transformation of British Life 1950–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 54.
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop [1967] (London: Virago, 2003), p. 2.
Margaret Drabble, ‘Introduction’, Nell Dunn, Poor Cow [1967] (London: Virago, 1988), p. xii.
Adrian Henri, ‘Introduction’, Nell Dunn, Up the Junction [1963] (London: Virago, 1988), p. xiii.
Heather Walton, Literature, Theology and Feminism (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 42.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook [1962] (London: Paladin, 1989), p. 297.
Lessing, Martha Quest [1952] (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 249.
Lessing, Landlocked [1958] (St Albans, Herts: Panther, 1976), pp. 104–5.
Mary Renault, The North Face [1948] (London: Virago, 2014), p. 286.
Sarah Dunant, ‘Introduction’, Return to Night (London: Virago, 2014), p. xii.
Mary E. Snodgrass, Encyclopaedia of Feminist Literature (New York: Facts on File, 2006), p. 445.
Allan Hepburn, ‘The Fate Of The Modern Mistress: Nancy Mitford And The Comedy Of Marriage’, Modern Fiction Studies, 45: 2 (1999), 340–68, 362.
Brian Magee quoted in Gabriele Griffin, Heavenly Love? Lesbian Images in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 41.
Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain: 1945–1968 (London & New York: Tavistock, 1980), p. 158.
Maureen Duffy, ‘Afterword’, The Microcosm [1966] (London: Virago, 1989), p. 289.
Maureen Duffy, Wounds [1969] (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 11.
John J. Sutherland, Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960–1982 (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 3.
In 1969 C. H. Rolf published Books in the Dock (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969) in whose Foreword John Mortimer demands that ‘we should not only be able to defend to the death other people’s right to say things with which we disagree; we must also allow them to do it in abominable prose’ (p. 10).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Myler, K. (2017). Sex, Censorship and Identity. In: Hanson, C., Watkins, S. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47736-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47736-1_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-47735-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47736-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)