September 22nd, 2025 – Dr Clara Jones of King’s College, London, “Radical Politics and Readers’ Competitions: Amabel Williams-Ellis and Left Review”, Visibilisation seminar

We had the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Clara Jones of King’s College, London on September 22nd, 2025 during the Visibilisation team seminar. You can find the abstract of her presentation below.

Scantly read today, Amabel Williams-Ellis was a high-profile woman of left-wing letters at the mid-century. Literary and political journalist, popular front novelist and consummate committee woman, her name features on the executives of signal modernist institutions and political organizations, including The Left Book Club and International PEN. This talk focuses on her involvement with one such institution, the radical journal, Left Review. Williams-Ellis co-edited the journal from 1934-1936; organised itsreaders’ competitions; reported from the First Soviet Writer’s Congress in Moscow in 1934 where she was the sole British delegate and wrote one-off articles and book reviews. And yet existing criticism has paid little attention to Williams-Ellis’s role at Left Review or the sexual politics of the journal more broadly, both things this talk aims to do via an examination of her administration of its ‘Readers’ Competitions’. This research on Williams-Ellis addresses the ‘blind spot for women’ which Janet Montefiore notes in ‘Marxist “counter-histories” which deal with other traditions of left-wing writing than “mainstream” Audenesque (The Dangerous Flood of History (Routledge, 1996)p. 20)


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
lbenoit (September 22, 2025). September 22nd, 2025 – Dr Clara Jones of King’s College, London, “Radical Politics and Readers’ Competitions: Amabel Williams-Ellis and Left Review”, Visibilisation seminar. Women & the F-Word. Retrieved March 16, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14vqj


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