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

Introduction

xi Introduction All fiction contains two primary impulses: the impulse to imitate daily life, and the impulse to transcend it. Gillian Beer, The Romance T he “low modern” and the “popular modernist” are twin classifying categories, emerging in contemporary scholarship on the modernist era, that may help us to deepen our understanding of the most widely read British literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They offer a literary-historical register on which to record the social “pitch” or “range” of the era’s distinctive genres of popular fiction, and they bring new tones into our concepts of high modernism. In recent years, scholarship on the New Woman novel, detective fiction, the adventure romance, and literary experiments of content (as distinct from form)1 has restored such middlebrow and lowbrow genres to their proper centrality in the history of fiction, and narrative generally, through the decades straddling 1900. As recently as the early 1990s, a scholar of British fin-de-siècle-through-1920s fiction could decry the “rigid demarcation between highbrow ( James, introduction xii Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf ), middlebrow (Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Forster) and lowbrow (names too numerous and repellent to mention)” and could observe that “[t]here are scrupulous and imaginative histories available which assess the first group critically, summarize the second sympathetically, and ignore the third.”2 Fifteen years later, the editors of the volume Bad Modernisms noted that some scholars had transformed the term modernist “from an evaluative and stylistic designation to a neutral and temporal one” to go “beyond such familiar figures as Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Woolf ” and to embrace “less widely known women writers” and “authors of mass cultural fiction.”3 Our knowledge of the vast body of popular fiction from this era is, in this sense, being democratized. Nonetheless, some of the most popular British fiction of a century ago—especially the work of women romance writers—has yet to be understood in relation to modernist literary history. With the exceptions of Marie Corelli, Elinor Glyn, and E. M. Hull, about whom new scholarship has been emerging in the past few years,4 the most successful female romanciers of Britain’s turn into the twentieth century have not yet received the kind of attention that their one-time cultural influence clearly merits. This would hardly have been surprising a few decades ago, but with the ascendance of gender studies and cultural studies, such an oversight might seem noteworthy. Rather than attributing the lack of attention to any putative neglect on the part of scholars of the period—and thereby implying terms of value regarding the aesthetic and cultural and political dimensions , real or presupposed, of these women’s romances—I think it is probably safer to assume that we have not yet seen studies of many of these novelists and novels simply because there are so many of them to consider. Indeed, where does one begin? My approach here is to examine a small group of romances, those that best exemplified the meteoric rise of the woman-authored love story in Britain. This study attempts to redress the “romance gap” in our literary-historical record ; it analyzes the discursive woof and warp of once-best-selling texts and traces these threads outward, through the wider webs of social signification in which we situate high modernist narrative. Scrutinizing a set of best sellers by romancists from Mary Ward to E. M. Hull, I hope to respond to a challenge issued by and to twentyfirst -century scholars of modernism: illumination of the cultural introduction xiii continuities and frictions that result when the traditional criteria of literary modernism are brought to bear upon texts that are usually thought neither to be art nor to be about art. My original impetus to approach the popular romances examined in this study was the simple fact that all were among the best-selling novels of their era, both in Britain and in the rest of the anglophone world. All but one of the eleven British-authored romances closely examined here appear in extant catalogues of best sellers in Britain and the United States from 1885 to 1925.5 A retrospective study published in London in 1934, Desmond Flower’s pamphlet A Century of Best Sellers, offers an authoritative list; using as his criterion the sale of at least 100,000 copies, he catalogues one to four best-selling novels per year in Britain during...