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

1. Contexts of Popular Romance, 1885-1925

1 Chapter One Contexts of Popular Romance, 1885–1925 F or an initial consideration of the relation of the popular romance to an emergent modernism, feminist criticism and gender studies may offer the best framework, especially as regards theories of genre and mode. Suzanne Clark’s work, for example, reveals the influence of the so-called (at the time) sentimental mode on important female modernists. In Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word, Clark restores this category to modernist literary history and vindicates the works of American (or New York–based) writers Emma Goldman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, and Kay Boyle.1 Clark’s critical investigation, published in 1991, anticipated by a few years the current revisionist impulse to reconfigure the “low modern,” the “popular modernist,” and the middlebrow within our regnant historiographies of modernist literature. In the present study, in parallel with Clark’s revisionist work, I trace the evolution of an older tradition of narrative representation—in this case, the romance mode—through narrative specimens of the modernist era. However, I want neither to claim that women romance writers from Marie Corelli to Edith Maude Hull deserve to be elevated to high modernist status, nor to champion Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield , or the Rebecca West of The Return of the Soldier as neglected chapter 1 2 women modernists (obviously, with the possible exception of West, this would be carrying coals to Newcastle). Though I am motivated by our need to take more seriously, as a chapter of cultural history, the turn-of-the-century women romance writers and to theorize the oft-overlooked Romantic and romance-mode dimensions of some high modernist texts, I am not presuming to offer a bid for the canonization of the neglected women writers or to describe the historical reading experience of the female audience. In fact, the popular romances under scrutiny here had not yet taken on the ideological stigma of the “feminized ‘other’ discourse” (which Clark properly associates with the sentimental mode from the early nineteenth century on)—or, more accurately, they did not do so until the end of this period, with the appearance in the 1910s of Dell’s Way of an Eagle and Hull’s Sheik. As is discussed in later chapters, men of the period professed to reading and valuing the early works of Ward, Corelli, Orczy, and other writers discussed here.2 Although the best-selling narratives covered here were at times tagged as “sentimental” (sometimes by fellow women writers, as discussed at the end of chapter 2), it was not generally by virtue of their romance mode per se that they were pejoratively gendered by cultural arbiters of the era. As Mary Hammond points out in her study of English literary taste in this period, it has become “a critical commonplace” in twenty-first-century criticism that “the romance . . . had very ill-defined and somewhat permeable boundaries, and that consequently the art/market opposition was less a divide than a negotiating table.”3 The women’s romance novel, as a massmarket subcategory of the romance mode, began to acquire its pejorative (and, of course, deeply ideological) associations with exclusively female writers and readers only in the third decade of the twentieth century, in the years following E. M. Hull’s publication of The Sheik in 1919. Even as late as 1932, the year in which Q. D. Leavis published Fiction and the Reading Public, the critic did not differentiate the sex of either author or reading public in her analysis of best-selling romances : Marie Corelli, Florence Barclay, Ethel M. Dell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gene Stratton Porter, and Horace de Vere Stacpoole— male authors as well as female ones (and American as well as British ones)—provided her prime instances of “fantasy-spinning . . . the kind of fiction classed as day-dreaming.”4 Prior to the 1920s, of course, “the romance” had had its detractors of various stripes for a long time; nonetheless, the ever-mutating forms, both poetic contexts of popular romance, 1885–1925 3 and fictional, ranged under this broad rubric were understood to be rooted in a native, organic, deeply British literary tradition going back six or more centuries, without a consistent gendering. Long past the medieval era of its importation from the Continent, “the romance” of whatever varietal was the gender-neutral fruit of homegrown vines. If the romance, as a narrative mode generally, has...