Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925 by Martin Hipsky, and: The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr. Miniver Read edited by Kate Macdonald (review)

Reading these two books together offers the exciting promise that there is far more to be discovered about the tastes of readers and the impact of gender on literary preferences at the turn of the last century. Both contribute to the intellectual project of mapping the landscape of middlebrow literature, a lost middle earth, as it were, hidden in the folds of literary history between the late Victorian period and World War II. Martin Hipsky’s Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925 uses gender, genre, and literary conventions as his compass while the authors in Kate Macdonald’s edited collection, The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr. Miniver Read, forge their path through the networks, institutions, and technologies that gave rise to readers’ preferences, publication practices, and authors’ masculinist ambitions.

Both books open by pondering the obvious question—how did the “brow” ever emerge as a category for reading or readers? As usual, the Oxford English Dictionary is illuminating. Initially, the “brow” referred to hair—first the fringe at the hairline, then what we would now specify as the eyebrow. As early as 1535 and certainly by the mid-nineteenth century, the brow had expanded to include all the real estate between the eyes and the hairline. More importantly for the purposes of current studies of middlebrow, this part of the face accrued special interest “as the seat of the facial expressions of joy, sorrow, shame, anxiety, resolution, etc.” (“brow, n.” OED Online. June 2004. Oxford University Press. 22 February 2014). It is almost as if the part of the body most proximate to the brain betrayed whether mind or matter, intellect or impulse, aesthetic experience or earthy emotions were preeminent in an individual.

Animalistic and racist representations of the face had long associated the shadowed low brow with the ape and the primitive, pushing the ivory brow of the European upper-class intellectual ever higher. Though scholars debate the precise date at which this opposition was complicated by the emergence of a third cultural type and corresponding literary sector, these two studies demonstrate that the publishing industry had a functional understanding of a highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow market for art and appetites by the end of the nineteenth century. Banality was probably the dismissive critique most feared by early twentieth-century novels, and Virginia Woolf witheringly administered a dose in her 1942 essay titled “Middlebrow”: “The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige” (Collected Essays, vol. 2 [Hogarth Press, 1955], 115). Anticipating both of the books at hand, Woolf models the high modernist impatience with middlebrow culture even as she acknowledges its appeal.

Hipsky approaches the middlebrow through attention to genre. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, readers could choose from a range of popular subgenres of fiction. Many of these subgenres were tied to character types such as the New Woman or the detective; others grew from subdivisions or breakdowns of existing categories or modes, particularly “romance,” a term capacious enough to cover both love stories and adventure novels in the 1890s. Hipsky zeroes in on a group of love stories written by and for women in order to argue that literary histories of high modernism have eclipsed a longer history of what he calls “popular modernism” (xii). Anchoring his analysis in studies of the romance by Gillian Beer, Kate Flint, Rita Felski, and others, he asks how the conventions of the centuries-old...