“At Least I get my dinners free”: Transgressive Dining in Marghanita Laski’s To Bed with Grand Music

In her 1946 novel, To Bed with Grand Music, Marghanita Laski utilizes popular understandings of food consumption in order to illuminate topics of female sexuality and sexual agency. Laski addresses the issues of wartime sexuality and infidelity with an ambivalence that parallels British anxieties about the changing roles of wartime women, and her project is successful because it runs counter to the wartime expectations for women that were much publicized in mass media and by government ministries that shaped both feminine standards of behavior and the limits of public tolerance for women who would flaunt those standards.