Ministries and Moles: Literary Information Networks at the Ministry of Information

This poster articulates the relationship between two wartime novelists – Cecil Day-Lewis and Elizabeth Bowen – and the Ministry of information during World War II. Both authors were sought to provide information to the Ministry regarding home front morale. While Day-Lewis took on a role at the Ministry of Information in the Publications Division, Elizabeth Bowen took an informal role, sending letters to the Ministry of Information indicating Irish public opinion on England’s wartime policies. Despite their differing interactions with the MOI, both authors incorporate discussion of the institution’s home front policies covert in their fiction. Writing under the nom de plum Nicholas Blake, Day-Lewis’ wartime detective novels consistency register the strategies through which the Ministry of Information collects morale data, even incorporating ‘observers’ that recorded civilian discussions about wartime policy and sent them to the Ministry. Likewise, Bowen’s novel The Heat of the Day dramatizes the type of informational policies the Ministry pursued during the war. This poster will demonstrate the policies of MOI and its emergence in the fiction of Cecil Day-Lewis and Elizabeth Bowen.