Blitz Writing

Emerging out of the 1940-1941 London Blitz, the drama of these two short works, a novel and a memoir, comes from the courage and endurance of ordinary people met in the factories, streets and lodging houses of a city under bombardment. Inez Holden's novella 'Night Shift' follows a largely working-class cast of characters for five night shifts in a factory that produces camera parts for war planes. 'It Was Different At The Time' is Holden's account of wartime life from April 1938 to August 1941, drawn from her own diary. The introduction and notes are by Kristin Bluemel, exploring how these short prose texts work as multiple stories: of Inez Holden herself, the history of the Blitz, of middlebrow women's writing, of Second World War fiction, and of the world of work.