Essays, Chronicles and Fiction: Alternatives to Despair

As some of the foregoing discussion has indicated, mutually exclusive distinctions between fact and fiction, or between the essay and the novel, can narrow the significance of reference to the literary and social climate. The essay and that form of fiction sometimes close to the essay, the chronicle, emphasise the tangible, direct, socially referential language that novelists sought to bring into fiction. Some writers of the period go further in blurring conventional distinctions between essay and fiction, in formal terms, in their own definitions of their careers, and in the acknowledgement, implicit or explicit, that essays and novels both mix fact and fiction in the author’s attempt to communicate her or his version of experience. The blurring of distinctions between literary forms is also, for some in the thirties, an anti-modernistic gesture, a deliberate counter-movement to what they, accurately or not, saw as a modernistic tendency to separate art from life, or artist from audience. The range and diversity of this literary representation of experience might best be seen through the language and concerns of three women influential during the 1930s: Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West and Storm Jameson. All wrote novels, essays, reports and chronicles throughout long careers; none was as great a novelist, as probing and intense in her representations of language, as were Elizabeth Bowen or Rosamond Lehmann. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.