Wallace, Doreen
Entry updated 14 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
Working name of UK author Dora Eileen Agnew Wallace Rash (1897-1989), author of much popular fiction over a 65-year career. Forty Years On (1958) is set in the fens of Eastern England on the Isle of Ely (in fact not an island but a marsh-surrounded raised village surmounted by the famous cathedral) after a nuclear Holocaust, which had the virtue of solving at one blow the problem of Overpopulation. Here, under pastoral guidance, a chaste rural Fabian Utopia is soon founded (see Cosy Catastrophe), and survives Post-Holocaust tribulations. Much late, the narrator visits other – visibly less blessed – parts of the fragmented Ruined Earth shambles that Britain as a whole has succumbed to, with cannibalism and American pop songs creating general misery among the survivors, mostly working-class, who continue pertinaciously to attempt to breed, once again threatening Britain with a superflux of urban spongers, though this is symbolically alleviated by the fact that cannibalism has become common. The general political stance is in keeping with Wallace's 1930s sympathy for the British Union of Fascists. [JC]
Dora Eileen Agnew Wallace Rash
born Lorton, Cumberland: 18 June 1897
died Depwade, Norfolk: 22 October 1989
works
- Forty Years On (London: Collins, 1958) [hb/]
about the author
- Susan J Leonardi. Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
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