Description
Book Synopsis''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
Trade ReviewReview from previous edition Accessible, informative and entertainingly written. * Laura Jane Macbeth, The Independent Weekend Review *
A fascinating study of literary culture, which offers many intriguing tasters of the novels themselves. The bizarre characters and scenarios, and the conscious ironies of some of these "good bad books" leave one curious to read more. * Clare Griffiths, Times Literary Supplement *
Table of Contents1. 'Books Do Furnish a Room': Readers and Reading ; 2. 'Not Our Sort': The Re-Formation of Middle-Class Identities ; 3. Imagining the Home ; 4. The Eccentric Family ; 5. A Crisis of Gender? ; BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX
