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"Simons, Judy"
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REF pilot: humanities impact is evident and can be measured
Judy Simons declares that the cultural and societal benefits of the arts are transformative, calculable and must be advertised
Journal Article
The Vanishing Hero
When Rosamond Lehmann died in 1990, her obituary notices were obsessive in unearthing links between her fiction and her personal life. In particular, obituary writers seemed fixated on the men in Lehmann’s life, on her passionate affairs and their equally intense traumatic collapse. As Hermione Lee pointed out in The Times, ‘No man would get obituaries like’ these.1 Women writers always run the risk of being judged and classified according to gendered criteria, especially when, as in Lehmann’s case, their work conforms to the literary models that have traditionally provided the staple diet of middlebrow ‘women’s fiction’. It is, however, more helpful to see Lehmann’s novels of the 1930s not so much as an autobiographical journey or a transparent reflection of her erotic career but as a register of the emotional climate of her times. The self-conscious and subversive deployment of the romance format in a work such as The Weather in the Streets (1936) serves to interrogate the relationship between sexualities and textualities, by exploring the artistic and social divisions characteristic of the period, where the failure of grand narratives exposes the linked crises of gender and aesthetics that absorbed many writers of that generation. Addressing this very issue, Lehmann regretted the ‘androgynous disguises, the masculine masks’ adopted by modern women in order to cope with a world in collapse, a ‘general post-war fissuring and crackup of all social and moral structures’.
Journal Article
REF Pilot: humanities impact is evident and can be measured
The research excellence framework impact pilot exercise, just completed, set out to answer the question being asked, ever more insistently, by the Treasury: \"If public funding is poured into university research, what does the public get for its money?\" Five disciplines, including English, were invited to test a methodology to identify and rank the impact of research outside the academy. The pilot panel combined academics from the 2008 research assessment exercise's English panel with representatives from \"user\" organisations, including the BBC, the British Library, public-examination bodies, publishers, journalism, theatre and PR firms, plus the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Trade Publication Article
Gender roles in children’s fiction
Girlhood and boyhood, at least until quite recently, have often been treated as separate, different and unequal in children's literature. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century children's books are full of strong, active boy characters, and much more submissive, domestic and introspective girls. But equally prevalent, even if sometimes less immediately obvious, has been a recurrent expression of the flimsiness and artificiality of the division between boys and girls, and of the desire of many protagonists to contravene the gender identities enjoined on them. Many favourite characters from children's books either long to defy the simple gender categorisation imposed on them as members of the Anglo-American middle classes, or actually actively transgress the roles assigned to them. Here, for instance, is Georgina, speaking out in the first of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books:'I'm George', said the girl. 'I shall only answer if you call me George. I hate being a girl. I won't be. I don't like doing the things that girls do. I like doing the things that boys do. I can climb better than any boy, and swim faster too. I can sail a boat as well as any fisher-boy on the coast. You're to call me George. Then I'll speak to you. But I shan't if you don't.'George epitomises both the sharp division between the social construction of girls and boys and the longing to cross the divide. Wearing shorts, with cropped curly hair and refusing to answer to her given name, this dogged eleven-year-old is determined to dodge the female role in which biology has cast her.
Book Chapter
