“I had caviare for dinner,” writes an upper-middle-class London widow in her war diary for Mass Observation in July 1941. “I felt somewhat guilty over so doing, but after all if it is continuing to be imported that is the government's funeral, and if—as I imagine—what we are offered is part of pre-war stock, it might just as well be eaten up.” The diarist, a mother of two who manages her household alongside two maids, is not the typical working-class Londoner we imagine sacrificing for the Second World War effort under British rationing. Yet her remarks about obtaining expensive food, and her ambivalence about her ability to do so, help establish a sense of the class differences and competing themes of control and power wartime and post-war restriction brought. Alongside her sometimes glib excitement over caviar and being a “gross self-indulgent goumandizer [sic],” her diary reveals a temporary obsession with obtaining and hoarding eggs when they grow scarce: her interest in the availability of food parallels a society-wide concern for everyday markers of consumption. Late modernist literature of the war and immediate post-war years likewise reflects this attention to the friction between government and social control, changes in class, and the ensuing shifts in structures of power. In fiction written between 1939 and 1960 (considered the late modernist period)—and set either in the war years or the years of post-war rationing from 1945 to 1954—writers highlight food and food consumption as a palatable means of discussing their reactions to perceived shifts in class and power in British society.

In this chapter I consider the visceral and oftentimes symbolic place of food in late modernist work by Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Henry Green, Olivia Manning, and Elizabeth David. In the wartime fiction of Bowen and Green, the innocuous fragile egg trades as class currency, and the writers’ attention to the presence or loss of eggs indicates deep concerns about a decline in class privilege. Pym also traffics in eggs and omelettes in her post-war novel Excellent Women, but her depiction of middle-class consumption and single womanhood indicates a sometimes-ambivalent satisfaction with the enforced austerity of post-war food control as it mirrors the ostensibly austere but ultimately liberating choice to remain a single woman.