Margins of Desire' turns the critical spotlight on the London suburbs by showing how the expanding city created new literary locations, genres and themes between 1880 and 1925. Drawing on a wide range of writings, the book considers not only the fiction that identified the suburbs as significant but also the fiction that suburban dwellers, particularly women, wrote and read for themselves. Pervasive suburban themes included the loss of the rural, the rejection of the urban, the feminisation of culture and changing class identities. By engaging with modernity as represented by the suburbs, such writing was subversive of literary tradition and value, and signalled a shift towards the idea of the ordinary, the accessible and the harmonious. The suburbanisation of the literary imagination is addressed through studies of suburban and anti-suburban utopias by writers such as William Morris, E.M. Forster, Jerome K. Jerome and Arthur Conan Doyle; the imaginative terrain created by women writers in magazine and popular fiction, and representation of suburban realities from George Gissing's attacks on mediocrity to G.K. Chesterton's celebration of the ordinary. Lynne Hapgood's lively approach opens up a counter-culture to modernist metropolitanism and argues for a more inclusive understanding of the fiction of the period. -- .

Eddie Hapgood, Footballer is the extraordinary story of a young unknown from Bristol who became Arsenal and England captain and a national hero, in the dark days of the 1930s. His impact is so enduring that when the millennium dawned, the public voted him one of the greatest sportsmen of the century. That glorious legacy was painfully achieved. Hapgood considered football an art and played it joyously as part of a team, but he struggled when politics, class and money threatened to undermine him and corrupt football. By the late 1930s, the ugly shadows of fascism, Nazism and looming war were bearing down on the beautiful game. Hapgood found himself in a public fight for justice and respect, while behind the scenes he protected his family with dedication, love and humour. In this gripping memoir, his daughter Lynne Hapgood pulls together the various threads - success, celebrity, tragedy and vindication - to reveal the real Eddie Hapgood. She examines the nature of sporting greatness and its impact on fans and family.

Margins of desire turns the critical spotlight on the London suburbs by showing how the expanding city created new literary locations, genres and themes between 1880 and 1925. Drawing on a wide range of writings, the book considers not only the fiction that identified the suburbs as significant but also the fiction that suburban dwellers, particularly women, wrote and read for themselves. Pervasive suburban themes included the loss of the rural, the rejection of the urban, the feminisation of culture and changing class identities. By engaging with modernity as represented by the suburbs, such writing was subversive of literary tradition and value, and signalled a shift towards the idea of the ordinary, the accessible and the harmonious. Lynne Hapgood's lively approach opens up a counter-culture to modernist metropolitanism and argues for a more inclusive understanding of the fiction of the period. -- .