| Title | 23. Still Part of Me |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Alison Twells(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0461.23 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0461/chapters/10.11647/obp.0461.23 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Alison Twells |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-11-10 |
| Long abstract | Chapter 23: Still Part of Me, explores themes of nostalgia and regret. The chapter opens with a discussion of Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, which moves backwards from the end of the war, showing her characters prior to revealing the events – love, desire, disappointment and loss – that shaped them. Waters echoes the many historical studies that focus on the lack of measurable change in women’s lives, despite the common myths about the war as a herald of liberation. The chapter then explores Danny’s reappearance in Norah’s later diaries in the context of her subsequent relationships. A central theme is the shame of being a single woman in a Fifties’ Britain, when being marriageable – and then married -- was central to a woman’s social value and self-worth. In 1978, Danny crops up again in Norah’s diaries, now in the context of her lonely mid-life with Eddy, the vaguely glamorous but war-damaged German she met in 1958. Disillusioned and deeply unhappy, Norah’s status as a common-law wife meant that she had no rights to the home she had helped to create; she is trapped. In 2009, the year she died, Norah again sought out Danny’s phone number in the context of her later-life loneliness and her growing nostalgia for her girlhood years. |
| Page range | pp. 221–250 |
| Print length | 30 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Alison Twells is Professor of Social and Cultural History at Sheffield Hallam University. A widely published scholar, her work primarily explores 19th-century local and global history, with a focus on empire, antislavery and missions, and C19th and C20th women’s life-writing. Her academic publications include The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class: the ‘heathen’ at home and overseas, 1792-1850 (Palgrave, 2009) and Women in Transnational History: Gendering the Local and the Global (Routledge, 2016)), and numerous articles and book chapters. Her recent publications include contributions to History Workshop Journal, The Historical Journal, and Women’s History Review, focusing on creative historical methods, servicemen’s letters and wartime intimacy, and explorations of emotion in ordinary pocket diaries. Always uneasy with academics writing only for each other, Alison is actively engaged in public and creative history initiatives. She has been a pioneer in developing community-facing history in UK universities and has written resources for history education in schools and a city walk about the life in late-C19th Sheffield of activist Edward Carpenter. She has talked about Norah, writing working-class lives, and history, fiction and life-writing, at various events. See www.alisontwells.com