"Kristin Bluemel has written an intriguing and provocative book about four eccentric contemporaries. She is very good at showing the interweaving creativity of the four lives in question, and charts a surefooted path through their fictions, sensitively noting the changing mores and social conditions reflected in their work. Orwell is the most celebrated British writer to survive the period, and Bluemel's project is to bring other writers associated with Orwell in from the literary margins by examining their interrelationships, both personal and creative, in the context of their times. The result is a fascinating glimpse into the literary imagination of wartime England and a subtly-argued contribution to the ongoing debate about sexual and racial stereotyping in fiction."--Gordon Bowker, author of the recent Inside George Orwell "Bluemel's lively study gives us a new take on mid-century English literary history, unsettling the well-worn frameworks of genres and periods. Like her chosen authors, her position is both radical and eccentric, asking fresh and provocative questions, and making the reader think again about Englishness, literary life and political commitment in London during the 1930s and '40s."--Alison Light, University College London "This illuminating and elegant chronicle of the lives and works of "Radical Eccentrics" guarantees that we revise our analysis of the relationship between politics and art of the Thirties and Forties. Bluemel makes us see that fascism and imperialism are not merely theoretical or ideological terms in those times and ours, but that they come insidiously alive when antisemitism becomes part of the picture.

Rigorously researched and compellingly written, this book is a significant intervention in our discussions of modern British literary culture and race as it shows these writers struggling with the fate and figure of the Jew."--Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University and author of Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire " George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics is a welcome and important contribution to our understanding of literary London in the late 1930s and 1940s. Combining original readings of well-known texts and the careful exhumation of long-forgotten books, Kirsten Bluemel explores some of the fascinating and neglected spaces between Modernism and Modernity. This little-known group of novelists gathered around George Orwell addressed subjects to which he remained curiously blind or indifferent; their responses to the modern city, to politics, war, the English language, and Englishness were often at odds with his. But by placing Orwell in the context of an intellectual, literary, and social milieu of 'radical eccentricity' stretching from Palmers Green and Portman Square to the Punjab, Bluemel reveals Orwell to be rather less unique--and therefore more interesting--than usual studies of the period allow."--Andy Croft, author of Red Letter Days and Comrade Heart.