Female Labour at Bletchley Park: reality and (romantic) fiction

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.