Reading for Pleasure
Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Reading for Pleasure
Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
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Description
Asserts that the popular romance offered new possibilities for young working women as social actors and media consumers in early 20th-century Britain.
Young working women were the target audience for popular romance fiction and film in early 20th-century Britain, and as such, were often seen as impressionable consumers of escapist fantasies. Reading for Pleasure complicates this narrative, revealing how women writers, readers, and audiences reimagined the romance.
Reading bestselling novels by Elinor Glyn and E. M. Hull, weekly magazines for girls and young women, and the writings of birth control campaigner Marie Stopes and socialist feminist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, among others, Lise Shapiro Sanders offers an interdisciplinary study of early 20th-century popular romance fiction written by and for women, in the context of the star discourses and fan cultures of silent cinema. She examines how the popular romance resonated with the lives and experiences of young working women, exploring topics such as fashion, beauty, and consumption; desire, pleasure, and affect; sexuality and contraception; feminism, labor, and political activism.
By examining the historical foundations of the popular romance, Reading for Pleasure argues that we can glean important insights into young women's social and political agency, both in the early 20th century and today.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading for Pleasure
1. From Modern Girl to Modern Woman: The Romance Weekly
· Periodicals and the New Reading Public
· “Film Fame or Love?”: Glamour and Fashionability on Page, Stage, and Screen
· Fantasy in Fiction and Film Narrative
· Girls Growing Up: Navigating Modern Womanhood
2. Scenes of Desire: The Sex Novel and Sensory Pleasure in Fashion and Film
· Fashioning Romance: Lady Duff Gordon's Lucile Ltd. and “Madame” Elinor Glyn
· Affect and the Pleasures of Romantic Mise-en-Scène in Beyond the Rocks
· The Shopgirl and the “It Girl”: Autonomy and Adaptability in It
· “Dressing Tastefully on Limited Means”: Lucile's Advice to Working Women
3. Consuming Orientalism: The Sheik and the Desert Romance
· Commodifying Orientalism
· The “Eastern Scene”: Women, Travel, and the Desert Picturesque
· The Fabric of Fantasy in E. M. Hull's The Sheik and The Sons of the Sheik
· “In Reply to Yours”: Stars and Fans
4. Working Women, Sexual Agency, and Contraception: marriage and Motherhood in the Writings of Marie Stopes
· “The Heart's Desire”: Married Love and the Language of Romance
· Wise Parents, Radiant Mothers: Letters from Readers in Mother England
· Contraception and Eugenics in The Race, Our Ostriches, and Maisie's Marriage
5. The Politics of Dress and Activism: The Working-Class Romance
· Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's Socialist Feminism: Poetry and Periodical Culture
· “Silk, Satin, Muslin, Rags”: The Anti-Romance and the Affective Politics of Dress in This Slavery
· “Lights-Fairyland-Romance!”: Hindle Wakes
6. Conclusion: What We Read and Why We Read It
Notes
Index
Product details
| Published | 12 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 288 |
| ISBN | 9798765141595 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 33 b&w illustrations |
| Dimensions | 229 x 152 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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