Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925

Notes

261 Notes Introduction 1. See Jane Eldridge Miller, Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism, and the Edwardian Novel (London: Virago Press, 1994) for an example of recent scholarship that makes the case for a modernism of content. In connection with a host of novelists of the Edwardian period—Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster , John Galsworthy, Ada Leverson, Amber Reeves, Olivia Shakespear, and Elizabeth von Arnim, among many others—Miller has proposed that “these works of fiction should be considered examples of the modernism of content, an antecedent stage to the more familiar, canonized modernism of form” (7). 2. David Trotter, The English Novel in History, 1895–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993), vii. 3. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., Bad Modernisms (Durham , NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1. 4. See, in particular, Ann Ardis, “E. M. Hull, Mass Market Romance, and the New Woman Novel in the Early Twentieth Century,” Women’s Writing 3, no. 3 (1996): 287–96; Janet Galligani Casey, “Marie Corelli and Fin de Siècle Feminism,” English Literature in Transition 32, no. 2 (1992): 163–78; the chapter on Elinor Glyn in Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76–109; Annette Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Laura Frost, “The Romance of Cliché: E. M. Hull, D. H. Lawrence, and Interwar Erotic Fiction” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 94–118; Jill Galvan, “Christians, Infidels, and Women’s Channeling in the Writings of Marie Corelli,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 (March 2003): 83–97; Elizabeth Gargano, “‘English Sheiks’ and Arab Stereotypes: E. M. Hull, T. E. Lawrence, and the Imperial Masquerade,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 171–86; R. B. Kershner, “Modernism’s Mirror: The Sorrows of Marie Corelli” in Transforming Genres: New Approaches to the British Fiction of the 1890s, ed. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, notes to pages xxii–2 262 1994), 67–86; Nickianne Moody, “Elinor Glyn and the Invention of ‘It,’” Critical Survey 15, no. 3 (2003): 92–104; Carol Margaret Davison and Elaine M. Hartnell, eds., “Marie Corelli,” special issue, Women’s Writing 13, no. 2 ( June 2006); Teresa Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999). 5. The sole exception is Marie Corelli’s late romance Innocent: Her Fancy and His Fact (New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1914). But this novel was described by her biographer Teresa Ransom as “one of her most popular books” (Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli, 192), and it was one of the nine of Corelli’s thirty books that were adapted into a silent film (1921). 6. Desmond Flower, comp., A Century of Bestsellers, 1830–1930 (London : National Book Council, 1934). 7. Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 647; “Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Profits” (unsigned), Literary News, April 1903, 116. 8. Richard L. Kowalczyk, “In Vanished Summertime: Marie Corelli and Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 7 (Spring 1974): 862. 9. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8. 10. Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 14. 11. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid, eds., High and Low Moderns : Literature and Culture, 1889–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18. 12. Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970). 13. Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 86. 14. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 266. Chapter One: Contexts of Popular Romance, 1885–1925 1. Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 2. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001) for accounts (derived from memoirs, autobiographies, library records, and readers’ surveys) of male reading during this period. Corelli, Orczy, and Glyn are each mentioned several times. 3. Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 6. 4. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus , 1932), 54. notes to pages 3–15 263 5. On...