Embracing Domesticity Between the Wars: The Writing of Jan Struther

Abstract

This paper examines a little-known British writer named Jan Struther in an effort to shed light on domestic ideologies between the wars. Struther’s middlebrow writing, forgotten today but a success in its time, is important in revealing how domesticity can be re-packaged for the modern interwar woman.

In a period where feminist progress in terms of partial franchise and increasing work opportunities for women jostled with reactionary ideologies that positioned women in the home once again, I argue that Struther’s work in her comic essays and her best-selling Mrs. Miniver highlights the struggle of middle-class women to confront domestic limitations, not by resisting and rejecting domesticity, but by updating domesticity itself.