Anxious Affinities

Women’s writing of the 1940s frequently expresses anxiety—about war, about children, about work, about independence, about social rights—to the extent that it adopts this as a formal mode. Rosamond Lehmann’s short stories, The Gypsy’s Baby (1946), for example, convey the angst of the wartime parent for the wartime child in their depiction of the mother as sole carer in a dangerous environment. Likewise, Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, The Heat of the Day (1949), describes the period of the London Blitz and the vulnerability of women alone in terms of an anxious sense of unknowing. Agatha Christie’s fiction, too, repeats the worry that one’s contemporaries might represent a threat as they are transformed from friend to stranger in the aftermath of war

Aesthetics · Agatha · Anxiety · Art · Depiction · Literature · Period (music) · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Worry · African history and culture studies · Evelyn Waugh and Hans Urs von Balthasar Studies · Gender Studies · History · Psychology · Travel Writing and Literature

• The Social Importance of How Bodies Inhabit Spaces with Others

  Susana Onega•The European Legacy•2021

  Add to list