I've had Nicola Humble's book, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, checked out so long that I had to bring it back to the library to renew it for another round. I don't often read books of literary criticism unless I want a book of essays to shed light on some classic I have read. I find this topic so interesting however, I want to highlight everything I'm reading (actually mostly I've just been skimming parts that relate to books I've been reading). I've decided that I'm going to have to break down and order a copy to own, but it's so darn expensive I keep putting it off (just how long can I keep this library copy anyway).
In her introduction Humble talks about her own interest in this type of literature:
"...my own interest in what I have come to define as the feminine middlebrow began with pleasure. Studying English--and a great deal of literary theory--at Oxford in the mid-1980s, my circle of female friends developed a cultish taste for what we called 'girly books'--those women's novels of the first half of the century discovered in second-hand bookshops, and just beginning to be reissued by Virago. The generic 'girly' book combined an enjoyable feminine 'trivia' of clothes, food, family, manners, romance, and so on, with an element of wry self-consciousness that allowed the reader to drift between ironic and complicit readings. A classic of the type would also reveal a maelstrom of thwarted impulse struggling beneath the surface of the text, even a hint of psychosis beneath its ebullient fripperies. We read these books not in the spirit of analysis but of pure self-indulgence: they were at one with the bright red lipstick we decided offered no contradiction to our radical feminist principles. I think we saw them as a form of camp--revelling in their detailing of a mode of feminine existence that seemed eons away from our own. They certainly had no direct bearing on the model of English literature we constructed for the benefit of our finals examiners. Fifteen years later, I no longer see these novels as camp: their concerns seem both more serious and less safely distant, and the world of the women who wrote them and the women who read them is central to the way I now understand the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the issue of pleasure still seems to me crucial: it is our thinking about the pleasures of the first readers of these books--of their own oscillations between knowing and surrendered readings-- that will open up for us a sense of what the middlebrow really meant in this period."
I've been so fascinated lately with books from this period (particularly the interwar years) that I'm just drinking them all in. I especially like reading groups of books like this and comparing and contrasting. I'd like to get in some social history as well. I'm not sure how long this reading phase is going to last and it will likely morph into something else, but for now I'm going to continue reveling in these books.