Most studies of the interwar years have focused upon literary elites, rendering the period and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognize how much ideas of national identity were bound up with notions of femininity and private life. Boldly moving across the culture, from the highbrow novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett to the detective fiction of Agatha Christie, the author traces the making of a conservative national temperament...

A collection of essays which offer a testimony of the dialogue between the present and the past.

Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a bohemian but without her servants - cooking, cleaning and keeping house - she might never have managed to write. Mrs Woolf and The Servants explores the hidden history of service. Through Virginia Woolf's extensive diaries and letters and brilliant detective work, Alison Light chronicles the lives of those forgotten women who worked behind the scenes in Bloomsbury, and their fraught relations with one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.

First published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Family history begins with missing persons," Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring.

Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a ne'er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than we'd hoped. That didn't stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her father's life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is...