"Suburbs are not so bad I think": Stevie Smith's Problem of Place in 1930s and '40s London

4 Frances Spalding, one of Smith's most sensitive and sympathetic readers, struggles to position Smith in English literary culture. She settles for this odd description: "[Her] work was and is difficult to pigeon-hole. Her play with a small range of ideas, often repeated, introduces a philosophical element that makes her a kind of lower highbrow, halfway between a solid middlebrow such as Rosamond Lehmann and the sparkling philosophy of Iris Murdoch" (224). Other critics have tried more or less successfully to ally Smith with modernism or postmodernism. Certainly either of the modernist or postmodernist classifications, suggestive as they are of some kind of historical connection between Smith, other English writers, and English literary history, are preferable to the decision by the Norton Anthology of English Literature editors to describe Smith as "one of the absolute originals of English literature, whose work fits into no category and shows none of the characteristic influences of the age" (Abrams, et al. 2221).

5 As many have noted, Smith's politics are hard to pin down. Her refusal to ally her artistic practice with either Tory or Labour or Catholic ideologies during these most political of decades has certainly contributed to her marginal position within standard accounts of '3Os or '4Os literature. So have her generic practices. She was publishing prose in the '3Os when poetry and drama were the fashionable forms for elite writers, and she was trying to publish poetry in the '4Os when everyone else was publishing their war novels and memoirs. She is missing from Hynes's The Auden Generation, and even Valentine Cunningham's monumental, revisionary British Writers of the Thirties does not treat her work in any depth. It took the feminist critical studies of the '90s to really bring Smith into literary critical discussion. see, for example, Severin; Dowson; Montefiore; Lassner; Plain; Schneider.

6 In contrast to Orwell and his heroes, Smith and her heroines do not look to politics for solutions to social and cultural problems. In The Holiday (written during the war and published in 1949), Smith's alter ego Celia explicitly rejects the solution of anti-middle-class politics recommended by the "intelligent revolutionary," Basil, a figure based on her friend George Orwell (104). see 1050 -0 108 for a defense of the suburb populated by "the less wealthy sort of middle-class person" (105).

7 Alan Jackson describes the late Victorian "fertile ground" that paved the way for the development of semi-detached London in the early decades of the twentieth century. He starts with the middle-class suburbs, like Baling and Sidcup. where "woods and fields were never very far away, and urbs mixed most harmoniously with rus" (21). Next, he treats the lower-middle-class suburbs, like Bowes Park, Wood Green, and Smith's Palmers Green, where houses were smaller and closer together but more like properties in Baling than in the inner-city. Finally, he describes the poorer railway suburbs, like Edmonton and southern parts of Woods Green, where artisans, clerks, and the middle strata of the urban working class lived in houses that stood "rank behind rank like soldiers at a military review" (22).