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Current Research
British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Image courtesy of John Irving on Flickr
This work looks at post-war Britain through changing styles of femininity that expressed many of the key concerns of the nation in the twenty-five years that followed the end of the Second World War. In the 1950s, American glamour was exported to a war-torn Britain, part of a larger passage of commodities that crossed the Atlantic in this period. In the process, however, something important happened, blonde became British, Marilyn Monroe became Diana Dors.
The book will explore this process as it evolved through the 1950s and 1960s and was subjected to the changing definitions of class, social aspiration and desire that shaped the post-war nation. It includes material delivered as the Paul Mellon Lectures at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2023 and Yale University in 2024, will be published by Yale UP for the Paul Mellon Centre in autumn 2025.
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It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)
Lynda is currently working on a book on the 1947 British film It Always Rains on Sunday, for the British Film Institute Film Classics series, published by Bloomsbury Press.