A Feminist Library

As Alison Light points out in the introduction to this new collection of her writing, Inside History is a little reminiscent of a festschrift, though one in which the contributions are written by the subject herself. But Light notes that since 1995 she has not held a full-time academic post, and many of the essays presented here were originally written for publications aimed at a general rather than specifically academic readership. Indeed, one of the themes of Light’s work since the 1980s has been to interrogate that distinction between ‘general’ and ‘academic’ readers, not only by giving popular works of literature the kind of scrutiny that had previously largely been reserved for ‘classics’, but also by considering issues of education, class and identity in the context of life-writing. It’s worth remembering that when Light published her still hugely influential book Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (1991), it would have seemed unlikely that there would be an academic conference devoted to the legacy of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca (at the time of writing ‘Re-imagining Rebecca’ was scheduled to be held at the University of Sussex in May 2022). That the middlebrow would be a category almost as fiercely contested and debated as modernism might equally have been surprising. As Light points out, scholars in cultural studies and film were breaking ground where English would follow, and her writing consistently illustrates a determination not to be confined by traditional academic categorisations. This isn’t just a case of employing an interdisciplinary approach, or, for instance, examining Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation of Rebecca alongside the novel, as Light does in ‘Hitchcock’s Rebecca: A Woman’s Film?’, first published in Sight & Sound in 1996. It extends to the self-reflexive strand in Light’s work. For instance, in ‘Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice’, which appeared in English in 1994, Light moves from a comparison between Smith and Philip Larkin in relation to the notion of ‘Englishness’ to reflect on the role of poetry as a means of inculcating Alison Light, Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022, x +234 pp., £85, ISBN: 9781474481557