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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > Women's studies
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The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s - Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Paperback, Revised)
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The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s - Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Paperback, Revised)
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'Middlebrow' has always been a dirty word, used disparagingly since
its coinage in the mid-1920s for the sort of literature thought to
be too easy, insular and smug. Yet it was middlebrow fiction -
largely written and read by women - that absolutely dominated the
publishing market in the four decades from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Neglected by subsequent critical fashion in favour of the work of
literary elites, this literature has only recently begun to be
reassessed. Aiming to rehabilitate the feminine middlebrow, Nicola
Humble argues that the novels of writers such as Rosamund Lehmann,
Elizabeth Taylor, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, and a host of
others less well known, played a powerful role in establishing and
consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender
identities in this period of volatile change for both women and the
middle classes. The work of over thirty novelists is covered, read
alongside other discourses as diverse as cookery books, child-care
manuals, and the reports of Mass Observation. Investigating the
nature of the feminine middlebrow and its readers, the author
considers its variously radical and conservative remakings of ideas
of class, the home, the family and gender. Defining her period as
running from the end of the first world war to the mid-1950s, she
challenges the prevailing convention that sees the second world war
as effecting a decisive ideological and cultural break, and offers
a revision to the way we currently map the changing politics of
femininity and the domestic in the twentieth century. The first
work to insist on the centrality of the concept of the middlebrow
in understanding the women's writing of this period, The Feminine
Middlebrow uncovers a literature simultaneously snobbish and
bohemian, daring and conventional, marked by an ideological
flexibility that is the product of its paradoxical allegiance to
both domesticity and a radical sophistication.
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