Nicky Haslam

Flappers, by Judith Mackrell – review

issue 15 June 2013

I’m never quite sure what the term ‘flappers’ means. How did these creatures flap, and why? Where did they flap? Did they flap all day, or only at night? Were theyin a flap, or being flapped, sad-flaps or flap-happy? Did they open flaps, or close them? Did they flap Jacks, or flip Jills, or both?

Reference books don’t help much. The OED says the word means a fly-killer, and you really don’t want to know the Dictionary of Slang’s definitions. So what was, in the accepted vo-deyo-do-ing, headache-band-browed, fancy-dress costume and Baz Luhrmanesque image, a ‘flapper’?

One might assume that in this substantial, erudite and detailed, but oddly humour-free book, Judith Mackrell would set out to enlighten us. But instead she focuses on six women, each renowned in their own way, ‘of a dangerous generation’, as her subtitle has it. The 1920s were essentially their early adult years, but surely that decade was less dangerous than the one before it, or those to come?

Like the relieving interval in some interminable opera, the author breaks her subjects’ stories into two five-year chunks apiece, in which each one’s life (practically day by day), parents, affairs, marriages, correspondence and thoughts are delved into in lengthiest detail, fleshed out by what we already know of them through several biographies, not to mention memoirs and autobiographies.

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