This is a study of the novels by and for middle-class women that dominated the publishing market in the first half of the twentieth century. Works by Agatha Christie, Nancy Mitford, Stella Gibbons and many others are considered alongside cultural products such as cookery books, child-care manuals and women's magazines.
"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. Aiming to rehabilitate the feminine middlebrow, Nicola Humble argues that the novels of writers such as Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, 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.
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.
