Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel: Elizabeth Von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor by Erica Brown, and: Femininity and Authorship in the Novels of Elizabeth Von Arnim: At Her Most Radiant Moment by Juliane Römhild (review)

In its 1925 Christmas edition, Punch magazine jested that the British Broadcasting Corporation had recently discovered a new type of audience, the “middlebrow”: “It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like.”¹ Even in this early usage, the prejudices inherent in the term are ensconced; for middlebrow fiction, they hold that popularity must be antithetical to quality, comedy to realism, and reading pleasure to cultural value. The genre has also, of course, been compulsively feminized by critics before and since. Now, well over a decade since Nicola Humble’s ground-breaking study, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (2001), this category of writing has been comprehensively critically redefined, its neglect thoroughly castigated, and its scholarly attention firmly justified. The feminine middlebrow novel has been re-evaluated as a site of intense negotiation of the politics of female identity. Those presiding tensions between triviality and worth have been reread to reveal much about the cultural hierarchies and the dominance of modernism in the interwar and postwar years.

Within this shifted context, Isobel Maddison published Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden in 2013—the first full-length critical study of von Arnim’s work. Though preceding the term middlebrow itself and beginning her writing career outside its customary interwar parameters, von Arnim (1866-1941) slips gracefully into the middlebrow paradigm (and has subsequently suffered its attendant prejudices). A popular and successful author who married (twice) into aristocracy, von Arnim’s career spanned four decades and produced twenty novels, a children’s book, an autobiography, and two short stories. Cousin to Katherine Mansfield, employer of E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole as tutors to her five children, and correspondent of Henry James, von Arnim blended high- and middlebrow concerns to fine comic effect in her writing. Maddison’s richly researched volume, with an appendix that generously catalogues the author’s archive at the Huntington Library, concludes with the hope that her book will inspire more scholarship on von Arnim’s work. A footnote in Maddison’s book regrets the fact that Erica Brown’s Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel: Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor was not published at the time of her writing²; in turn, Brown’s study just predates the publication of Juliane Römhild’s Femininity and Authorship in the Novels of Elizabeth von Arnim. Römhild commends Maddison’s “wide-ranging introduction,” as well as Brown’s analysis, which helped her to “develop a clearer understanding of von Arnim’s self-perception as a comical writer” (p. 17).

Despite its critical renaissance, “middlebrow” remains a highly unstable term, indicative of a reflexive and hybrid fictional form, as well as the continually shifting valences of literary taste that influence its reception. Once the founding surveys are complete, how should academic critics best approach their studies of middlebrow authors, whose work is characteristically prolific and diverse? Brown’s approach is to bring von Arnim’s work together with that of another perennially underrated writer, Elizabeth Taylor (1912-75). The pairing seems an irresistible one. Both women married relatively higher up the social scale and explored a resulting sense of isolation and a need to navigate unfamiliar mores in their work. Both produced feminine middlebrow fiction—in Taylor’s case, twelve novels, a children’s book, and four short story collections. Brown’s focus is on style, form, and technique as understudied elements of both authors’ work (and the middlebrow category more generally); she...