This book is the first comparative study of the novels written by five German-speaking women – Anna Gmeyner, Selma Kahn, Hilde Spiel, Martina Wied and Hermynia Zur Mühlen – who had to flee National Socialist Central Europe. Gmeyner, Spiel, Wied and Zur Mühlen found refuge in Britain and thus added – together with male colleagues such as Stefan Zweig and Robert Neumann – an important but rarely investigated new dimension to the British literary landscape. The aim of this study is to reassess the women refugee writers’ narrative strategies and integrate their work within feminist literary studies. The author investigates the five writers’ narrativisation of everyday life, used to subvert the dominant discourse, and their portrayal of the intersection between class, racial and gender oppression. She also shows their innovative ways of picturing the gendered tension between the experiences of exile and exile as a modernist metaphor as well as their search for ways to refute the Nationalist Socialist rewriting of history. The book situates the novels within the theoretical discussions surrounding exile studies, social history and women’s writing.

«This study is [...] essential reading for scholars of German literature in the field of Exile, Women's and Jewish Studies, and provides rich background reading to the novels discussed. Hammel's latest volume should further encourage researchers to expand their scope of German Studies and to treat narratives written by women in exile as an intrinsic and vital part of the literary canon.» (Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner, Austrian Studies)

The Author: Andrea Hammel is a Research Fellow at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies and a lecturer in German culture and history at the University of Sussex. A former visiting lecturer at the Freie Universität Berlin, she has published widely on the writing of women refugees, German-speaking refugees who came to Britain and survivors’ autobiographies.