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...