This essay has a double purpose. The first is to set out the function of
France, as the place of salvation, in Storm Jameson’s writing in and
about the l930s. The second is to suggest that her familiarity with
French culture – specifically, French writing – provided key models
for some of the most important formal innovations she embarked on
in that time. Jameson’s was one of the voices most consistently raised
against the low, dishonest decade. She devoted herself to conducting
two interconnected salvage operations on the social wreck: in the
one, recovering a sense of human values (for her, those of a socialism
that foregrounds respect for individual needs and dignity), and in the
other, looking for that honest and politically effective way of writing
about them which was the elusive goal of all her contemporaries on
the Left. The success of both was linked for her to the French connection.
In the mid-1930s, her Mirror in Darkness trilogy, planned as
a five- or six-volume series novel, ran into sand. In the last volume,
the heroine, Hervey, who is and is not Jameson, seems to have come
to a dead end. Ten years later, however, she is back, in the Journal of
Mary Hervey Russell (1945), speaking with a new voice.1 That Journal
is written from France, and it breathes out, at every turn of the
page, Hervey’s sense of a personal debt to the country for having
redeemed her vision and her writing.