Journey from the North: A Memoir

ONE OF THE 20th CENTURY’S FINEST MEMOIRS: the sweeping, candidly told story of a life in writing and politics, 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 20th 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.

After a lifetime of writing a novel every year, Storm Jameson turned to memoir with this stated ambition: ’I am trying to write without lying’. The result was an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her childhood, 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, a role she used to help refugees escape Nazi Germany.

In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: from encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, to travels across Europe as fascism was rising. Throughout, she writes with electric candour and immediacy about her own motivations and psychology as she traces her lifelong struggle to live on her own terms.

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.