This was open access when I read it, but in case that changed, I archived it. Unfortunately you'd have to scroll down a bit to get to the text of the article and the pdf wouldn't save.
Here's the abstract:
The growing importance of Bletchley Park in the cultural memory of Britain’s Second World War – its deployment by political and media commentators as a symbol of British exceptionalism – has been noted by historians. Such is its ubiquity, the Bletchley story has been featured in Hollywood blockbusters, television dramas and documentaries, and its luminaries – most notably Alan Turing – have become household names. With this, the Bletchley Park narrative has contributed to and been shaped by wider wartime mythologies – not least ‘the people’s war’ and conflict as a vehicle for progressive social change, particularly regarding women. One of the latest manifestations of this has been a spate of historical romance fictions, often with a feminist yet also socially conservative reading of the war and the institution. This represents a hugely popular, yet thus far critically neglected body of work and readership which directly speaks to the folk understanding of intelligence work.
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This article has a twofold purpose. First, to emphasise and present details of the role of women at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Since the 1974 declassification of records about Ultra – the systematic cryptanalysis of high-grade Axis wireless traffic – and Bletchley Park, the historiography has tended to focus on the overwhelmingly male cryptanalysts and senior managers at the Park, and this has largely been reflected in popular representations of Bletchley and wartime cryptanalysis. Second, to bring readers’ attention to and analyse the significance of a burgeoning body of popular fiction that has escaped academic notice but has placed the women of Bletchley Park at the centre of its narratives. At stake here is the role that Bletchley Park plays in the cultural memory of the nation – its mythic resonance and status.
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The first part of this article will present a historical record of women’s employment and Bletchley Park, contrasting this with the prevalent view of the Park in historical scholarship and some film and television representations of the organisation. In the second, the import of Bletchley Park’s historical romance will be considered through a reading of three examples of the genre: Marg[a]ret Dickinson’s Secrets at Bletchley Park (2012), Molly Green’s Summer Secrets at Bletchley Park (2022), and the self-published novel by Madalyn Mor[g]an, The 9:45 to Bletchley (2016).
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wartime historical romance tends to emphasise and exaggerate positive constructions of the Home Front, including the itself mythical notion of a People’s War, evolving (for the better) relationships between the sexes, and classless meritocracy. As we shall see, in Bletchley novels, this tension between historical detail signalling the ‘real’ of history, and the expected motifs of the popular romance genre, plays out in relationships that ignore the still largely intact class boundaries of wartime institutions, and in the outsize roles which are undertaken by its heroines – including counterintelligence fieldwork that is implausibly run out of Bletchley Park.
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As with the wider genre of romance fiction, these Bletchley novels tend to feature a three-part structure of falling in love, a block to love, followed by a reconciliation and confession or re-affirmation of love – happy endings rarely clouded by the continuing violence and aftermath of the Second World War.
This was open access when I read it, but in case that changed, I archived it. Unfortunately you'd have to scroll down a bit to get to the text of the article and the pdf wouldn't save.
Here's the abstract:
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