'Postcards from the Future: Rebecca West, Storm Jameson and the War Abroad'

This research project interrogates the relationship between war and travel in the writings of Rebecca West and Storm Jameson, feminist and socialist pioneers who spent the late 1930s travelling throughout Eastern Europe, from Yugoslavia to Czechoslovakia. Both women transformed their experiences abroad into works like Jameson's novel Europe to Let (1940) and West's travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), politicised travel narratives which functioned as cautionary tales for British audiences at home. By combining recent studies on wartime temporality with the topography of thirties travel, this research project asks in what ways these travelogues engage with the conflict to come, and for what political purposes. Apart from these works, my project will also consider a body of nonfictional writings whose preoccupation with political crisis sets the stage for West's and Jameson's subsequent travelogues, including West's psychobiography St Augustine (1933) and Jameson's later memoir Journey from the North (1969).
In Abroad (1979), Paul Fussell defined travel writing as the interwar genre par excellence. Bernard Schweizer's Radicals on the Road (2001) subsequently expanded Fussell's predominantly masculine scope to include Rebecca West's visits to Yugoslavia. The relationship between women travellers and South-Eastern Europe has also received particular attention in John Allcock and Antonia Young's Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travelling in the Balkans (2000). Insofar as they grapple with past violence and imminent conflict, however, West's and Jameson's travel narratives can also be read as distinct forms of war writing. In this sense, they respond to the same type of analysis that Paul Saint-Amour carries out in Tense Future, which ascribes a preoccupation with incumbent conflict to modernist works that are not ostensibly about war. Similarly, Marina MacKay's Modernism, War, and Violence (2017) defines political violence as a structuring principle that resonates from the early avant-gardes to the literature of post-war Britain. Yet, despite their frequent overlapping, the relationship between travel and war in the interwar years remains a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. My project attends to the scarcity of scholarly engagement with this subject by focusing on Rebecca West's and Storm Jameson's writings. In doing so, my research will also contribute to the long-overdue scholarly treatment of West's and Jameson's prolific work that is beginning to gather momentum.
West's and Jameson's writings also chime with other politically-minded journeys of the period, such as Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (1934) and Auden and Isherwood's Journey to a War (1939). Methodologically, then, my doctoral project will adopt a historicist approach that places West and Jameson in conversation with these other works, whilst also deploying the more theoretically-informed approaches of trauma studies and spatial humanities, which provide the most appropriate critical framework for conceptualising the relationship between war and travel at the centre of this study. This will afford new insight into these influential yet critically under-examined authors, and allow analysis of some of the critical issues of the interwar-from foreclosed futurity to transcultural mobility-in the context of recent history and contemporary debates. In other words, in what ways can Rebecca West's and Storm Jameson's engagement with travel and war illuminate subsequent understandings of transcultural encounters and historical crisis?