Leisure in the Domestic Novel between the Wars

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Notes

¹Bowden and Offer's article interestingly reveals that the diffusion rates for new, non-gendered electrical appliances, such as the radio and television, were far more rapid than for domestic appliances that would have only benefitted the female members of a family. Their findings are a reminder of the subjugated position of the housewife within the family as her needs are often not prioritized in the family budget (Bowden and Offer 1996).

²This use of leisure in the novel echoes Lehmann's epigraph from W. S. Landor, from whom she also derives the title of her book: ‘But the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.’ Women's leisure is the moment in the present when past and future are addressed, with conservative implications.

³Lehmann's writing in general is finely attuned to the devastations of the First World War. As she herself commented, the Great War ‘cracked the whole structure of our secure, privileged and very happy life. The bath water grew cold, the huge lawn was dug up for potatoes, the sons of friends were killed. I became aware of grief—other people's grief, world grief’ (quoted in Simon 1992:8–9).

⁴Elizabeth Cambridge was the pseudonym of Barbara Hodges née Webber. Hostages to Fortune was her first novel and echoes her own life.