The Moon is Making

The Moon is Making is a bleak, unsettling and psychologically charged portrait of a fractured coastal community. Through the lens of the Wikker family – whose moral decline and eventual ruin is the focus of the novel – it explores class division and emotional alienation, all set against the stark backdrop of the socially divided town of Whitby at the turn of the twentieth century.

But despite all this, the book is also a love letter to the North of England, and to Whitby, and its enduring dramatic appeal to writers, artists and musicians (think Bram Stoker, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Michel Faber and Kate Atkinson, not to mention folk music, the artist Dame Laura Knight, the fabulous actor Sam Barnett, and of course, modern Goth culture).

“The Moon Is Making ranks very close to the top in the lengthening list of Storm Jameson's novels. It is superior in technical skill ... and dramatic power. Manifestly, Miss Jameson is a writer worth watching…”
- The New York Times, 1938

Storm Jameson (1891-1986) was a well-known figure in literary circles during the early twentieth century, writing a staggering number of novels, memoirs, biographies, articles, short stories, and even plays.

But she was never part of the Bloomsbury Group, or even on its fringes: she was from an entirely different background altogether. Storm was a Northern writer, born into a tough ship-building background in Whitby rather than a literary family. And yet, she was the first woman to be awarded a first-class degree in English from Leeds University; and she was an activist and a committed socialist throughout her life.

In 1920 she wrote that she “had a duty to engage with and reflect on the issues of its day” and put this into practise, serving as the President of English PEN throughout World War Two (during which time she helped hundreds of refugee writers and their families to flee occupied Europe).

Storm's work was highly praised in her lifetime, and she was a well-known figure working alongside H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster and Rebecca West. But her writing and her achievements have been largely forgotten by critics and readers more recently.