Five Leaves Publications

Book details

Time and Tide was a feminist weekly review of politics and the arts, founded in May 1920 by Welsh businesswoman and suffragette Margaret Haig Thomas, Lady Rhondda (1883–1958). A leading voice in interwar feminism, the magazine was unique in becoming the only female-run intellectual weekly in Britain’s ‘golden age’ of weekly review journalism, competitive with the New Statesman. Contributors to the magazine included Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Robins, George Bernard Shaw, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, Ellen Wilkinson, and Virginia Woolf.
This souvenir edition is published to mark the centenary of Time and Tide’s first issue. Replicating the format of the original magazine, it contains a selection of pieces (articles, fiction, poems, reviews, letters) by prominent women writers and journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, and a foreword by Polly Toynbee. The publication will be accompanied by a ‘Festival of Women Writers and Journalists’ to mark Time and Tide’s centenary and consider the continued relevance of its history for women and feminism today.

Reviewed by Dianne Kirby in Socialist History:

“As part of a larger AHRC project, Catherine Clay has edited a souvenir centenary edition of Time and Tide that replicates the format of the original magazine. It contains a selection of fiction, poems, reviews, letters and political commentary, reflecting its commitment to feminism and socialism. Above all, it celebrated and showcased women, their views, opinions and approach to the era’s major issues. The selection reflects the slowness of women’s progress, incremental and hard won. Although men did write for Time and Tide, Clay has included only women because they were critical in making the periodical a success and ought, as well as deserve, to be better known. Some of course, such as Virginia Woolf and Vera Brittain, are well known. The selection of material reflects the periodical’s evolution from its foundation to becoming a magazine with overt feminist tendencies, to its expansion and rebranding in the late 1920s as a more general audience weekly review, responding in full to a world in crisis in the 1930s. The selection of contributions is informative and entertaining, reminding readers of the resplendent irony and deprecating mockery that was a mark of the era’s style and discourse. The adverts are worthy of study in their own right, providing incisive insights and a noteworthy commentary on the period. This imaginative publication offers a series of snapshots that provide thought-provoking discernments into a significant publication that played an important role in advancing women’s progress in the interwar years. With a foreword by Polly Toynbee and published to look and feel like the original, this creative centenary edition should have a wide appeal. Published by a small independent publisher, Five Leaves Publications, at a very reasonable price, it is an attractive as well as an informative acquisition that all can enjoy.”

About the Author

Both the centenary publication and event form part of a larger AHRC-funded project ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ directed by Dr Catherine Clay, Associate Professor in Feminist and Literary Studies at Nottingham Trent University. Dr Clay is author of the first in-depth study of Time and Tide: Time and Tide: The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (EUP 2018).