Journey from the North

After a lifetime of writing a novel every year, Storm Jameson turned to memoir with the ambition 'to write without lying'. The result was an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her childhood in Whitby, shadowed by a tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and her decision to leave her young son behind while she worked in London; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always marked by the struggle to make 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 of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, and travels across Europe as fascism was rising. Throughout, she writes with electric candour and immediacy about her own motivations and psychology.

Reissued with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, Journey from the North is one of the great literary memoirs: an uncommonly vivid account of a woman making a life for herself through the great shocks of the twentieth century.