We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) and Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75) wrote witty and entertaining novels about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Widely read and enjoyed, their work was often dismissed as middlebrow. Brown argues that their skilful use of comedy and irony worked as devices to provide the receptive reader with a subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life. She traces the critical reception of their novels from the publication of von Arnim's Christopher and Columbus (1919) to Taylor's In a Summer Season (1961). In doing so, she demonstrates that hostility to the 'feminine middlebrow', often supposed to be at its height between the wars, in fact intensified after World War II.
Shortlisted for the ESSE Book Awards, 2014 – Literatures in the English Language (Junior Scholars)
"'This is an impressive scholarly work. Erica Brown’s excellent new study spiritedly divests middlebrow writing of its pejorative associations and offers a lively and insightful analysis of Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Von Arnim as ironists and humorists whose style, comedic technique and sophistication situate them squarely within traditions of women’s writing associated with Jane Austen.'"
Loading metrics...
* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.
Usage data cannot currently be displayed.