All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text. This is hereafter referred to as The Wicked Lady. Magdalen King-Hall, ‘Finis?’, in The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1944) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber (1944) (London: Corgi, 1957), p.

Naomi Mitchison, You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1949 (London: Gollancz, 1979), p. Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 32).Īlison Light, ‘“Young Bess”: Historical Novels and Growing Up’, Feminist Review, 33 (Autumn 1989), pp. Jean Plaidy, Royal Road to Fotheringay (London: Robert Hale, 1955).Ĭarolyn Steedman, ‘True Romances’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1989), vol. Margaret Irwin, Young Bess (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944). This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors.

Thus historical novels offered them a means of keeping alive the recently acquired sense of adventure and freedom (including for many the enjoyment of extramarital affairs in the absence of their husbands) for which there were no longer the opportunities after men returned to the jobs in the workplace that they had vacated temporarily and women to their traditional roles in the home from 1945 onwards. I suggest that these romantic historical novels and others like them are effectively safely distanced displaced accounts of women’s emotional responses to the home front and that they provided women with vicarious romantic experience in contrast to the austerity and gloom that followed the Second World War. The figure of the Englishwoman was of symbolic and cultural significance in historical novels by women such as Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek (1941), Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber (1944) and Magdalen King-Hall’s The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1944).

Forever amber by kathleen winsor 1945