Nicola Darwood

University of Bedfordshire, Department of Education Studies, Faculty Member

University of Bedfordshire, School of Education and English Language, Faculty Member

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Senior Lecturer in English, University of Bedfordshire
Course coordinator for BA English, BA English Literature, and BA Education Studies of English
Interim Director of the Research Institute of Media, Arts and Performance

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Much of my research has focuses on twentieth century women writers, particularly Elizabeth Bowen and Stella Benson. I am the co-founder and co-chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society, and co-editor of the Elizabeth Bowen Review.

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Books by Nicola Darwood

The Elizabeth Bowen Review

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A World of Lost Innocence: the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Pubishing (2012)

Book Reviews by Nicola Darwood

Peer Review of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: International Perspectives Judyth Sachs and Mitch Parsell Springer (2014)

Journal of Pedagogic Development: 4:3 (2014 - forthcoming), 2014

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Posthumanism by Pramod K Nayar

Journal of Gender Studies, Jun 2014

Papers by Nicola Darwood

“Sometimes I Pose, but Sometimes I Pose as Posing”: Stella Benson's Early Fiction

Routledge eBooks, Jun 1, 2022

Stella Benson: a life of reading, writing and publishing

Stella Benson-feminist, diarist, novelist and travel writer-published her first novel, I Pose, in... more Stella Benson-feminist, diarist, novelist and travel writer-published her first novel, I Pose, in 1915. Her last book, a collection of short stories, was published posthumously in 1936. Although her diaries might suggest some reservations about the reception of her earlier novels, in a letter to Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1 Benson's husband James O'Gorman Anderson said of her work: 'Stella was quite happy about her writing, was sure of herself there, and had no thought of not being sufficiently appreciated.' 2 Others shared that opinion; for example, her 1932 novel Tobit Transplanted (titled The FarAway Bride in America) won the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize and the silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature. 3 Drawing on Benson's diaries and her correspondence with her publisher, Macmillan, this paper discusses the connections between Benson's reading, her writing and the subsequent publication of her early novels, I Pose, This is the End (1917) and Living Alone (published in 1919). It also considers the role of the recent republication of her fiction by Michael Walmer in a possible reclamation and re-examination of Benson's work in the twenty first century. Writing in 1934, just a year after Benson's death, Phyllis Bottome stated '[w]hen Stella Benson died last year, the world lost one of its most truthful inhabitants' 4. Commenting that Benson never really felt sure of her literary skills, Bottome records a conversation with Benson: 'A few months before her death she said to me "I feel I have got my tools now but I'm only just beginning to know how to handle them!'. 5 This is something that Benson also alluded to in her essay 'About my Books' published in 1933: If one could live on a consistent plan, I suppose it would be possible to write on a consistent plan. But short of this ideal-if it be an ideal-I do not know how anyone can discuss his or her work as though it had followed any conscious path of development through the changes of youth and middle age. I wonder if many writers, as they approach middle age, feel that all

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Travel agencies and trinket shops: representations of women of business in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction

Conference papers from the IAMCR Annual Conference, Dublin City University, Dublin, June 2013, pr... more

Stella Benson and 'Living alone': a real book for real people?

Conference paper from 'Making it New' conference, De Montfort University Feb 2015. Progra... more

A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific writer; her publishing career spanned five decades and during this... more Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific writer; her publishing career spanned five decades and during this time she wrote ten novels, over one hundred short stories and countless reviews and journal articles. While earlier novels are now acknowledged as Modernist texts, her later novels can be read through the lens of postmodernism; they can be considered variously as romantic fiction, marriage novels, war time spy thrillers and psychological drama but, throughout her novels, she consistently questioned notions of identity, sexuality and the loss of innocence. A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen offers a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction which focuses specifically on this loss, foregrounding the psychological conflicts experienced by her protagonists. It examines the subject not only across the range of her fiction, but also in relation to her unfolding narrative structures through a chronologically based discussion of her novels and selected short stories, interwoven with biographical information and drawing on unpublished letters. This book investigates the dominant kinds of innocence that Bowen represents throughout her fiction: the innocence attributed to childhood, sexual innocence and sexual morality, and political innocence, and argues that the transition from innocence to experience plays an important role in the epistemological journey faced both by Bowen’s characters and her readers

‘A grand Christmas pantomime': Nancy Spain's Cinderella Goes to the Morgue

Cambridge Scholars Publishing eBooks, Dec 1, 2020

‘The violent destruction of solid things’: Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime short stories

Whilst Elizabeth Bowen might have written to William Plomer that she "had such a good war", 1 she... more Whilst Elizabeth Bowen might have written to William Plomer that she "had such a good war", 1 she was acutely aware of the horrors experienced by many during the Second World War. She explores some of these horrors in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, a collection of short stories written and published individually during the second world war and then republished in the UK in 1945 and in 1946 in America as Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. In her introduction to the American edition, Bowen highlights some of her emotions during this time: In war, this feeling of slight differentiation [experienced during peace time] was suspended: I felt one with, and just like, everyone else. Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and everyone else began. The violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. Walls went down; and we felt, if not knew, each other. We all lived in a state of lucid abnormality. 2 Commenting that the "stories are not placed in the time-order in which they were first written", 3 Bowen believed that the collection represented "a rising tide of hallucination", adding that the "hallucinations in the stories are not a peril; nor are the stories studies of mental peril. The hallucinations are an unconscious, instinctive, saving resort on the part of the characters". 4 This paper focuses then on three stories which these hallucinations are explored through the manipulation of time-'The Inherited Clock' (where time is literally stopped), 'The Demon Lover' and 'The Happy Autumn Fields'. And I'm going to discuss them in the order that they were published in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, rather than in their chronological order, as I believe this lends a better appreciation of Bowen's editing process.

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Crossing borders: the fantastical world of Stella Benson’s 'Living alone

Conference paper from The 16th annual conference of the Space Between: Literature and Culture, 19... more

Introduction to Fiction and 'The Woman Question' from 1850 to 1930

‘A grand Christmas pantomime': Nancy Spain's Cinderella Goes to the Morgue

Cambridge Scholars Publishing eBooks, Dec 1, 2020

The making of a suffragette: Stella Benson and I Pose (1915)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Jul 3, 2020

Introduction to Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Dec 1, 2020

Retelling Cinderella: cultural and creative transformations

Cambridge Scholar, Dec 1, 2020

Interwar Women S Comic Fiction Have Women a Sense of Humour

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Feb 1, 2020

This collection of essays examines the work of five intermodernist writers. Some were established... more This collection of essays examines the work of five intermodernist writers. Some were established authors before the First World War and others continued to write after the Second World War, but this book focuses particularly on their writing between 1918 and 1939. Stella Benson, Bradda Field, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stella Gibbons and Winifred Watson had much in common: they all wrote novels full of comic moments, which often challenged the cultural politics of the interwar period. Drawing on the literary and critical contexts of each novel, the essays here discuss the use of comic structures that enabled the authors to critique the dominant patriarchal structures of their time, and offer an alternative, sometimes subversive, view of the world in which their characters reside. This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in interwar fiction, focusing principally on novelists who have fallen out of public view. It widens our understanding both of the authors and of the continuing, highly topical debate about interwar women novelists