Inez Holden, Night Shift (1941)
Lisa Mullen on Inez Holden, Night Shift.
Inez Holden’s life was full of wild and fabulous intensity – and she lived it with unapologetic commitment. She was born in 1903 into the sort of dysfunctional family that looked posh from the outside, but was booze-addled and neglectful indoors. She embarked on adulthood in the guise of a minor socialite, hanging out with the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, and rubbing shoulders with Cecil Beaton and his smart set. But the Bohemian life bored her - and besides, unlike the real toffs, she needed to earn a living. So she picked up a pen, first as a journalist, then as a short story writer, a novelist, and a small-time screenwriter. She became a political radical, hung out in leftist circles, and went to Germany after the World War II to report on the Nuremberg Trials.
In total, she published ten books of fiction, all carefully laced with keen-eyed social commentary – including the book which is the subject of this lecture, Night Shift, first published in 1941. Set in a wartime factory, it takes us inside the nocturnal lives of working-class women who make camera parts for war planes. Holden had worked in such a factory herself, and you can tell: her production lines are an endless round of tapping, drilling, filing, de-burring, milling and reaming; the workers’ lives defined by clock watching, forms filled out in duplicate; the greasy basins and oily towels in the washroom at the end of the shift; and the bombs falling around, and sometimes into, the workshop. The novella is about how the heart, and the mind, can survive intact under that pressure.
Holden was a utopian thinker, who didn’t just imagine, but could see a better society emerging from the hardship of the Depression and the horrors of fascism. And this utopian vision accounts for the fierce edge of political purpose which gives her work its slicing quality, as well as its hyper-real, almost hallucinogenic intensity. A nameless reviewer once observed: ‘Miss Holden could, if she wished, write quite well and lucidly. Instead she is clever.’ It was meant as an insult, but it reads now like a tribute to a woman who never apologised for seeing things differently, and writing down exactly what she saw.
*
Inez Holden (1902-1974) was a friend of George Orwell, Stevie Smith, Mulk Raj Anand, and Evelyn Waugh.
Night Shift is published in Blitz Writing by Handheld Press, 2019. Available from Toppings bookshop and Blackwells.
*
Live online lecture and seminar with Lisa Mullen, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 28 June 2025
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Fees
£32.00 Full price
£27.00 Students
£27.00 CAMcard holders
Live online via Zoom.
The lectures are recorded and made available to participants to listen again for 48 hours after the live lecture. The seminars are not recorded.
Lisa Mullen on Inez Holden, Night Shift.
Inez Holden’s life was full of wild and fabulous intensity – and she lived it with unapologetic commitment. She was born in 1903 into the sort of dysfunctional family that looked posh from the outside, but was booze-addled and neglectful indoors. She embarked on adulthood in the guise of a minor socialite, hanging out with the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, and rubbing shoulders with Cecil Beaton and his smart set. But the Bohemian life bored her - and besides, unlike the real toffs, she needed to earn a living. So she picked up a pen, first as a journalist, then as a short story writer, a novelist, and a small-time screenwriter. She became a political radical, hung out in leftist circles, and went to Germany after the World War II to report on the Nuremberg Trials.
In total, she published ten books of fiction, all carefully laced with keen-eyed social commentary – including the book which is the subject of this lecture, Night Shift, first published in 1941. Set in a wartime factory, it takes us inside the nocturnal lives of working-class women who make camera parts for war planes. Holden had worked in such a factory herself, and you can tell: her production lines are an endless round of tapping, drilling, filing, de-burring, milling and reaming; the workers’ lives defined by clock watching, forms filled out in duplicate; the greasy basins and oily towels in the washroom at the end of the shift; and the bombs falling around, and sometimes into, the workshop. The novella is about how the heart, and the mind, can survive intact under that pressure.
Holden was a utopian thinker, who didn’t just imagine, but could see a better society emerging from the hardship of the Depression and the horrors of fascism. And this utopian vision accounts for the fierce edge of political purpose which gives her work its slicing quality, as well as its hyper-real, almost hallucinogenic intensity. A nameless reviewer once observed: ‘Miss Holden could, if she wished, write quite well and lucidly. Instead she is clever.’ It was meant as an insult, but it reads now like a tribute to a woman who never apologised for seeing things differently, and writing down exactly what she saw.
*
Inez Holden (1902-1974) was a friend of George Orwell, Stevie Smith, Mulk Raj Anand, and Evelyn Waugh.
Night Shift is published in Blitz Writing by Handheld Press, 2019. Available from Toppings bookshop and Blackwells.
*
Live online lecture and seminar with Lisa Mullen, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 28 June 2025
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Fees
£32.00 Full price
£27.00 Students
£27.00 CAMcard holders
Live online via Zoom.
The lectures are recorded and made available to participants to listen again for 48 hours after the live lecture. The seminars are not recorded.
Lisa Mullen on Inez Holden, Night Shift.
Inez Holden’s life was full of wild and fabulous intensity – and she lived it with unapologetic commitment. She was born in 1903 into the sort of dysfunctional family that looked posh from the outside, but was booze-addled and neglectful indoors. She embarked on adulthood in the guise of a minor socialite, hanging out with the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, and rubbing shoulders with Cecil Beaton and his smart set. But the Bohemian life bored her - and besides, unlike the real toffs, she needed to earn a living. So she picked up a pen, first as a journalist, then as a short story writer, a novelist, and a small-time screenwriter. She became a political radical, hung out in leftist circles, and went to Germany after the World War II to report on the Nuremberg Trials.
In total, she published ten books of fiction, all carefully laced with keen-eyed social commentary – including the book which is the subject of this lecture, Night Shift, first published in 1941. Set in a wartime factory, it takes us inside the nocturnal lives of working-class women who make camera parts for war planes. Holden had worked in such a factory herself, and you can tell: her production lines are an endless round of tapping, drilling, filing, de-burring, milling and reaming; the workers’ lives defined by clock watching, forms filled out in duplicate; the greasy basins and oily towels in the washroom at the end of the shift; and the bombs falling around, and sometimes into, the workshop. The novella is about how the heart, and the mind, can survive intact under that pressure.
Holden was a utopian thinker, who didn’t just imagine, but could see a better society emerging from the hardship of the Depression and the horrors of fascism. And this utopian vision accounts for the fierce edge of political purpose which gives her work its slicing quality, as well as its hyper-real, almost hallucinogenic intensity. A nameless reviewer once observed: ‘Miss Holden could, if she wished, write quite well and lucidly. Instead she is clever.’ It was meant as an insult, but it reads now like a tribute to a woman who never apologised for seeing things differently, and writing down exactly what she saw.
*
Inez Holden (1902-1974) was a friend of George Orwell, Stevie Smith, Mulk Raj Anand, and Evelyn Waugh.
Night Shift is published in Blitz Writing by Handheld Press, 2019. Available from Toppings bookshop and Blackwells.
*
Live online lecture and seminar with Lisa Mullen, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 28 June 2025
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Fees
£32.00 Full price
£27.00 Students
£27.00 CAMcard holders
Live online via Zoom.
The lectures are recorded and made available to participants to listen again for 48 hours after the live lecture. The seminars are not recorded.