‘A Free Pen’: Women Intellectuals and the Public Sphere

Abstract

This chapter presents two case studies which explore how in the years leading up to the Second World War Time and Tide’s seemingly non-feminist veneer is disrupted. First, the chapter discusses Time and Tide’s book reviews section and argues that the surface appearance of a less feminist engagement with literature and the arts is called into question by the archive of Theodora Bosanquet’s automatic writing. This unpublished material resituates her public reviews and – in the context of a perceived crisis in book reviewing – reveals a mode of feminism that Barbara Green has theorised as ‘a form of attention’ (2017) and evidences Bosanquet’s ambivalence about the male professionalisation of literary criticism. Second, the chapter shows how Time and Tide’s seemingly non-feminist veneer is disrupted much more overtly when all the leading feminists of the period emerge publicly in the paper at the outbreak of the Second World War. Through an analysis of Time and Tide’s correspondence columns the chapter explores the contribution this magazine made to public debates about war and peace, and its sustained commitment to the ordinary woman reader.