Handheld Defiants Series

A collection of compelling letters between Frank and Lucy Sunderland, English pacifists and fervent supporters of Labour politics and the New Town movement, who were separated in 1916 when Frank was given his prison sentence as a conscientious objector. Frank and Lucy wrote to each other from November 1916 until April 1919 while Frank was in prison at Wandsworth and at Bedford. Lucy looked after their three children at home in Letchworth, and earned enough to keep the family afloat by keeping hens, collecting insurance premiums and taking in sewing. Their letters record how their predominantly pacifist and Quaker circle in Letchworth supported the family during its ordeal, contrasting with the attitude of their own London families. This unique collection of letters is important as a working-class record of wartime experience. The unsophisticated descriptions about heartfelt, practical concerns reveal the wife's voice as well as that of the conscientious objector: no other WW1 memoirs or diary gives these details of a woman struggling to keep the home going in her husband's absence. Selected and edited by Kate Macdonald, these letters reveal first-hand details of the British home front during the First World War, and the impact on Lucy's daily life of British politics, the New Town movement, feminism and women's emancipation, adult and workers' education, and Quakerism and pacifism.

Written in six weeks and drawing from the life she shared with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz is a classic novel of one woman’s experience in a fast-moving Jazz Age society. Alabama Beggs is a Southern belle who makes her début into adulthood with wild parties, dancing and drinking, and flirting with the young officers posted to her hometown during World War I. When Lieutenant David Knight arrives to join her line of suitors, Alabama marries him—and their life in New York, Paris, and the South of France closely mirrors the Fitzgeralds’ own life and their prominent socializing in the 1920s and 1930s. In Paris, Alabama becomes fixated on becoming a prima ballerina and refuses to accept that she might not become the great dancer that she longs to be, threatening her mental health and her marriage. Save Me the Waltz is a relic from The Lost Generation and the brilliant introduction from Erin Templeton shows how Alabama’s struggles mirrored Zelda’s own, particularly her need to have a life of her own rather than living in her husband’s shadow.

Published for the first time, this private collection of his letters tells the story of how this middle-class accountant came to be imprisoned, and what happened to him inside. The letters follow Wilfrid’s decision as an absolutist conscientious objector to voluntarily go to prison in 1917 rather than join the armed forces. He served his prison sentences cheerfully, with an abiding faith in his choice, and an increased awareness of working-class politics. With an introduction and epilogue, Wilfrid’s letters bring to life the realities of conscience, military discipline, and early twentieth-century prisons. The letters are uplifting and engaging, vividly telling the story of hope through faith, books and nature, alongside the daily endurance of prison conditions in wartime Britain. Wilfrid Littleboy went on to hold national Quaker leadership positions. His experience as a CO helped sustain in British law the right to conscientiously object to war, and influenced Quaker discernment on conscription and conflict during the Second World War and beyond. Dr Rebecca Wynter is a historian of medicine, and Ben Pink Dandelion is Professor of Quaker Studies, both at the University of Birmingham.

Back in print for the first time in seventy years is award-winning novelist Rose Macaulay’s Potterism, a satire on British journalism through the lens of both the owners and employees of a popular newspaper empire. When Jane and Johnny Potter are at Oxford they learn to despise their father’s popular newspapers, though they still end up working for the family business. But Jane is ambitious and wants more than society will let her have. Mrs. Potter is a well-known romantic novelist, whose cheap novelettes appear in the shop-girls’ magazines. She has become unable to distinguish fact from fiction, and her success gives her an unhealthy estimation of her own influence. When she visits a medium to try to find the truth about the murder of her son-in-law, she wreaks terrible damage. Arthur Gideon works for Mr. Potter as an editor. He respects his employer’s honesty while he despises the populist newspapers he has to produce. His turbulent campaigning spirit, and his furious resistance to anti-Semitic attacks, make him unpopular, and becomes an unwitting target of malice. With an introduction is by Sarah Lonsdale, Potterism is about the Potter newspaper empire, and the ways in which journalists struggled to balance the truth and what would sell, during the First World War and into the 1920s.

Latchkey Ladies opens in 1918 in the Mimosa Club, a women’s hostel in central London where young women office workers and ladies on declining incomes find refuge from the tedium of war work and the chilliness of impending poverty. Anne Carey is twenty-five. She is engaged to a young lieutenant in the army, but she is bored of him and bored of the war. When she meets Dampier, a man unlike anyone she has ever met before, they begin an affair, and then when he is holidaying with his wife and children at Easter, Anne realises that she is pregnant.