Subjects
Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel:
Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor
Erica Brown
Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace
978 1 84893 338 5: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 84893 339 2
Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) and Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75) wrote witty and entertaining novels about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Widely read and enjoyed, their work was often dismissed as middlebrow. Brown argues that their skilful use of comedy and irony worked as devices to provide the receptive reader with a subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life. She traces the critical reception of their novels from the publication of von Arnim's Christopher and Columbus (1919) to Taylor's In a Summer Season (1961). In doing so, she demonstrates that hostility to the 'feminine middlebrow', often supposed to be at its height between the wars, in fact intensified after WWII.
Readership
Literature, Women's Studies and Modernism
Contents
Introduction
1 The 'Middlebrow' and Comedy: Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim's Cultural and Literary Context
2 A Comedic 'Response' to War? Elizabeth von Arnim's Christopher and Columbus (1919), Mr Skeffington (1940) and Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs Lippincote's (1945)
3 'One begins to see what is meant by "they lived happily ever after"': Elizabeth von Arnim's Vera (1921) and Elizabeth Taylor's Palladian (1946)
4 'One shudders to think what a less sophisticated artist would have made of it': The Comedy of Age: Elizabeth von Arnim's Love (1925) and Elizabeth Taylor's In a Summer Season (1961)
Conclusion