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In this article, I want to trace the interwoven pattern of relationships between Tillie Olsen's life as a working-class mother, her radical political commitment as a socialist and feminist and her own fictional and non-fictional writing. I want to show that despite the fragmentary nature of her literary production, there is a tangible and essential link between her personal experience, her politics and her aesthetics as a modern proletarian writer. It is, I would claim, this combination of gender, class and radical consciousness that enabled her to produce some of the most remarkably unorthodox fictional narratives of working-class women's lives in the whole of twentieth-century American literature.

This article takes as its critical point of departure Adrienne Rich's concept of a lesbian continuum of female sisterhood, support and dissent against the norms of patriarchal society. In particular, Rich's term is used to explore three key works from the 1930s by the English writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner – Opus 7, Whether a Dove or Seagull and Summer Will Show. Not only does Warner herself emerge both politically and personally as a radical lesbian writer during this turbulent period of the 1930s. The article seeks to argue in this context that these three works also represent in themselves a progressively connected delineation of a lesbian continuum of women's lives through the individual female and lesbian voices that are articulated in Warner's writing at this crucial stage in her career.

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