Journey from the North: A Memoir

Storm Jameson

2024-07 · Pushkin Press

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One of the 20th century's finest memoirs of literary and political life, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, who referred to the book as “literary gold”

“Stops you in your tracks. I would like to persuade everyone to read it” — Sunday Times

A compulsively readable, beautifully written account of a fascinating twentieth-century woman and life. This candid, affecting portrait of a woman who loathed domesticity explores how she sought to balance a literary career with political commitment.

Towards the end of her life, the writer Storm Jameson began her memoir by asking, “can I make sense of my life?” This question propelled her through an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her early years in Whitby, shadowed by her tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and repeated flights from settled domesticity; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always dogged by a lack of money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, helping refugees escape Nazi Germany.

In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells also of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, travels in Europe as fascism was rising and a 1945 trip to recently liberated Warsaw. Throughout, she casts an unsparing eye on her own motivations and psychology, providing a rigorously candid and lively portrait of her life and times.

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Margaret 'Storm' Jameson (1891-1986) was an English journalist and author. Born and raised in Whitby, she gained a scholarship to study English at the University of Leeds. After graduating with a First-Class degree, she moved to London where she became active in politics and began to write. Jameson remained committed to politics and literature throughout her life: she published a total of forty-five novels, as well as criticism, short stories and innumerable political articles; she was also the first female president of the British section of International PEN. In later life, she turned to writing her memoirs and produced the two volumes of Journey from the North, initially published in 1969 and 1970. Jameson died in 1986 at the age of ninety-five.