‘The Most Wonderful Wonderful Parties’ Gossip and anecdote as feminist epistemology in women’s oral histories of the creative community in postwar St Ives

This thesis explores the history of St Ives' creative community using oral history interviews with women from the St Ives Archive. Focusing on gossip and anecdote, I take and develop eavesdropping as a methodology. In doing so, this reveals the importance of feminine sociability and the locus of the party as an alternative, feminine creative practice, and the complex relationships and support networks that developed between women in St Ives' creative community. By listening to the voices of women in the oral history collection of St Ives Archive, gossip and anecdote also provide a way to explore women's experiences and memories of the town's bohemian creative community, and reveal hidden feminine modernities and modernisms. The history of the post-war art colony in St Ives has largely been considered through a masculine, modernist lens that focuses on a small number of artists and a mostly formalist reading of St Ives through their work. Little consideration has been given to the wider creative community of St Ives, and to women’s experiences in particular. I argue that women were attracted to move to St Ives in the years after the Second World War because of the towns' reputation for utopian bohemianism, and the freedoms this promised. Women moved to St Ives in order to make new and independent lives for themselves in an alternative community that enabled them to pursue their creative practice, and participate in and shape the community in which they lived.

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