Jameson

MARGARET (STORM) JAMESON (1891 - 1986)

Storm Jameson was born in Whitby, the daughter of a sea captain. She was the first woman BA in English at Leeds University (first class, in 1912), and began her writing career with The Pot Boils (1919). She wrote two trilogies dealing with family ship-building history; in The Lovely Ship (1927), she writes of 19th century Middlesbrough:

The night was dark, with a moonless sky pressing down on the sinister flaming labyrinth of furnaces and shafts. Every few minutes a column of flame-driven smoke shot up into the sky, illuminating the iron-workers' quarter and the docks beyond. A blade-edge of river flashed in the short-lived glow, and the sky was flushed with a tawny bloom...The darkness throbbed with a steady beat as if some monster were alive and moving in the night near her.

The significant use of 'sinister', 'quarter' and 'monster' denote an estranging sensibility, conventionally impervious to the thrillingly 'sublime' aspects of the scene, which even Aldous Huxley (q.v.) could register.

In the second trilogy Mary Hervey Russell, an ironmaster, reflects something of herself. The Voyage Home (1930), Mary reflects on Middlesbrough with the same detachment and rueful distaste:

... squalid, conceived overnight in the ugly haste of industrial opportunity, without a single gracious or redeeming line. Iron works and furnaces faced it across the bleak estuary of the Tees, grey slag tips, squat sheds, monstrous gas retorts, tall black shafts... There were children in the grime-eroded houses she was passing, but they might have been dead for any sound they made. Even the two playing languidly in the gutter were silent, scarcely moving their limbs out of the way of the wheels. Mary had opened a soup kitchen, which her daughters attended faithfully: perhaps soup every other day is little comfort to small hungry stomachs - but she had done what she could...

Early aware that human beings are 'wilfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to one another', Storm Jameson later worked (as president of English PEN during World War II) on behalf of European refugee writers and intellectuals. Her fine autobiography Journey from the North is distinguished by a fierce northern pride, emotional intensity and intellectual integrity

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
MARGARET (STORM) JAMESON (1891 - 1986) Storm Jameson was born in Whitby, the daughter of a sea captain. She was the first woman BA in English at Leeds University (first class, in 1912), and began her writing career with The Pot Boils (1919). She wrote two trilogies dealing with family ship-building history; in The Lovely Ship (1927), she writes of 19th century Middlesbrough: The night was dark, with a moonless sky pressing down on the sinister flaming labyrinth of furnaces and shafts. Every few minutes a column of flame-driven smoke shot up into the sky, illuminating the iron-workers' quarter and the docks beyond. A blade-edge of river flashed in the short-lived glow, and the sky was flushed with a tawny bloom...The darkness throbbed with a steady beat as if some monster were alive and moving in the night near her. The significant use of 'sinister', 'quarter' and 'monster' denote an estranging sensibility, conventionally impervious to the thrillingly 'sublime' aspects of the scene, which even Aldous Huxley (q.v.) could register. In the second trilogy Mary Hervey Russell, an ironmaster, reflects something of herself. The Voyage Home (1930), Mary reflects on Middlesbrough with the same detachment and rueful distaste: ... squalid, conceived overnight in the ugly haste of industrial opportunity, without a single gracious or redeeming line. Iron works and furnaces faced it across the bleak estuary of the Tees, grey slag tips, squat sheds, monstrous gas retorts, tall black shafts... There were children in the grime-eroded houses she was passing, but they might have been dead for any sound they made. Even the two playing languidly in the gutter were silent, scarcely moving their limbs out of the way of the wheels. Mary had opened a soup kitchen, which her daughters attended faithfully: perhaps soup every other day is little comfort to small hungry stomachs - but she had done what she could... Early aware that human beings are 'wilfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to one another', Storm Jameson later worked (as president of English PEN during World War II) on behalf of European refugee writers and intellectuals. Her fine autobiography Journey from the North is distinguished by a fierce northern pride, emotional intensity and intellectual integrity
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