Edwardian Transitions in the Fiction of Una L. Silberrad

Una Lucy Silberrad (1872–1955) was a successful, accomplished and popular novelist of the early twentieth century, but since her death she and her work have been largely forgotten. In 1915 the Irish Times described her as one of the "well-established novelists, who have only to write and be published to be read."¹ In 1919 her "strongly individual gift of story-telling" was noted as a fact,² as was the frequent observation of "the extraordinary way in which the plot very gradually and quietly gains grip" in her novels.³ Her work was "wholesome and substantial literary fare"⁴ in which "her freshly drawn characters are the real thing. And they have this air of actuality, of having been observed.… This originality is the power behind her books; her puppets have a semblance of nature about them, they move as they lived, and the reader knows them for flesh and blood."⁵ The Academy noted that Silberrad wrote about "the middling people of the middle class, so neglected by the novelist—except for the purposes of caricature."⁶ She was described in 1914 as part of "a group of writers who are doing a not insignificant service by depicting the minds, morals, and manners of people who individually do not count for much on the social scale, but who collectively represent so much of what is contemporaneously characteristic of the national life."⁷

These accolades are drawn from a limited sample of contemporary periodicals made searchable because of archive digitization: more information about Silberrad's reception and reputation is undoubtedly in existence. The tone of these reviews suggests a reliable, consistently popular novelist who had achieved the status of her works being known by her surname alone. The novels themselves present another enigma: she addresses issues of great interest to feminist scholars, to genre fiction, and to social historians, but she has not been studied. Yet her work demonstrates an awareness of social and cultural transition that

Una Lucy Silberrad in Her Mid-Sixties

Photograph Courtesy of Hugh Silberrad

reflects her period and the concerns of her contemporaries as British literary culture moved from the Victorian period to the beginnings of modernism. This article begins to redress this lack of critical attention by offering a survey of Silberrad's prewar fiction, with an emphasis on her two most intriguing novels of this period, to establish her place in literary and publishing history. Feminist criticism contextualises her work, since in common with many of her peers, she has slipped through the cracks of canonical literary history by being a woman writer and a writer of women's stories.⁸ The approach here has also been influenced by publishing history and by critical approaches to investigating middlebrow literature. Silberrad can be regarded as a writer of the ur-middlebrow,⁹ a stream of cultural productions created in parallel with those of early modernism that had its origins in the late-Victorian period. By the Edwardian period literary fiction that focused on the domestic and on ordinary life mirroring the lives of the anticipated readers was being channelled by publishers into reprint library series, designed to sell at a low price and in large quantities to the new generations of the educated middle class and lower middle classes.¹⁰

This stream of literature used the traditional discourse of realism to interpret modern life and depicted a consciousness of social change caused by developing attitudes to the role and function of women in society. These trends are a strong presence in Silberrad's work and yet are contradicted by her adherence to romantic stories set in modern times and historical romances of adventure and long journeys. There is a strong sense of the transitional when considering Silberrad's work. She herself was liminal, with a Victorian childhood and an Edwardian early career, followed by professional consolidation and commercial stability in the postwar period. Her position within periods of social change is reflected in the transitional motifs and themes in her fiction. This sense of crossing from one...