| Title | 13. If You Love Danny He Is Yours |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Alison Twells(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0461.13 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0461/chapters/10.11647/obp.0461.13 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Alison Twells |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-11-10 |
| Long abstract | Chapter 13: If You Love Danny He is Yours, focuses on Jim’s letters to Norah which, from early 1942, have come to focus on Norah’s relationship with his brother. The chapter opens with a strange letter from Jim that arrived during Danny’s Easter visit, in which he informs Norah that he won’t now be meeting her and assures her that he and his brother are ‘settled’ over her and if she loves Danny, ‘he is yours’. His next letter contains a torn-off scrap of paper, which – Jim says – is from a letter written to him by his brother, in which Danny urges Jim to visit Norah and describes her as ‘a grand, sweet, lovely and smashing lass.’ I explore this and later letters, which become increasingly prurient, and suggest that Danny has told Jim stories of an intimacy between himself and Norah that is far in advance of what had actually happened. As it is definitely Danny's hand-writing on the snippet that Jim sent on to Norah, it appears that Danny and Jim are somehow in cahoots, trying to hasten her seduction with words she would like to hear. After another sexually explicit letter of mid-July, Jim disappears from Norah’s life for a full year. |
| Page range | pp. 147–156 |
| Print length | 10 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