Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel

Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor

Erica Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317320739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor 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 their skilful use of comedy and irony provided the receptive reader with subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life.

1 THE MIDDLEBROW AND COMEDY: ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND ELIZABETH VON ARNIM’S CULTURAL AND LITERARY CONTEXT

The Middlebrow

The novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, sometimes assumed to be German, was in fact British. Born in Australia in 1866, she was the daughter of a wealthy British shipping merchant, and was christened Mary Annette Beauchamp. Mary, known in her childhood as ‘May’, moved back to England with her family when she was three years old, and grew up in London. Aged twenty-four, whilst travelling in Europe, Mary met her German husband, Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and through this marriage Mary Beauchamp became Countess von Arnim. The couple’s early married life was spent in Berlin, and the difference between this highly restrictive, upper-class society and von Arnims upper-middle-class English upbringing was profound; she struggled to acquire both the language and the necessary understanding of upper-class German etiquette. In 1894 they moved to the freedom of the Count’s derelict country estate, which von Arnim fictionalized in her first novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). Published anonymously because of the disapproval of her husband, the novel takes the form of a garden diary. Whilst combining the 1890s enthusiasms for both garden diaries and suburban comedies, the tone of the novel is distinctive: arch, unsentimental, regarding her husband, whom she refers to only as the Man of Wrath, with a pitiless comic eye.

Elizabeth and her German Garden was a huge success, goinginto eleven reprints in the first year, and creating one of the great literary intrigues of the period as the press speculated on the identity of the author. The Daily Mail produced a full-page article proposing that author was either Countess von Arnim; Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Henry of Prussia; or Daisy, Princess Pless.¹ Despite the subsequent identification of Countess von Arnim as the author, the name ‘Elizabeth’ persisted: it had become her literary brand. Later books were published simply as ‘by the author of “Elizabeth and her German Garden”’.²

When this first novel was published in 1898, the term ‘middlebrow’ did not exist.³ However, while the term was coined in the 1920s, unsurprisingly the origins of the concept of the ‘middlebrow’ can be found long before. Susan Bernstein has examined the emergence of a gendered and class-bound literary ‘browing’ in the 1860s, and Jennifer Shepherd, following the model explored by Teresa Mangum in Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998), specifically identifies Elizabeth von Arnims early novels as participating in the nineteenth-century formation of a women’s middlebrow culture.⁴ The roots of the literary categorization that was to designate von Arnim as middlebrow can be clearly seen in an article on the novel in the Sunday Examiner of 1901:

At lunches ‘Elizabeth’ is still discussed. At teas, women pass her in review after the delightful fashion of people who love without the thought of wherefore. They have all the pleasure of it and none of the task. Pin them down and they will say ‘Oh, those dear little children! And that bed of lilacs ! And the library ! Ah, how restful’. And isn’t it delightful not to know who did it.⁵

First, there is the issue of readership: this is a text read by the leisured middle-class woman, meeting for lunches and teas, who will later be overtly identified as the ‘middlebrow’ reader. Then there is the mode in which they read: in the ‘delightful fashion of people who love without the thought of wherefore’. This is unthinking, uncritical consumption, the mindless pleasure that Q. D. Leavis will deploringly associate with the middlebrow reader in her 1932 polemic Fiction and the Reading Public. Then there is the subject matter: the children, the flowers and the library. This is a resolutely domestic, feminine novel, and as Shepherd observes, ‘the very qualities that recommended Elizabeth and Her German Garden to contemporary women readers also alienated a sector of literary critics for whom “women’s books” were necessarily a lower form of art’.⁶ It is as we move into the 1920s that these literary hierarchies crystallize into the ‘battle of the brows’ and such women’s books are labelled middlebrow.

Defining what is meant by ‘middlebrow’ is not easy. This review indicates some of the range of issues at stake, and in the burgeoning field of middlebrow studies the difficulties of pinning down the characteristics of the middlebrow have been widely discussed: is it a question of theme, style, popularity or readership?⁷ The view I take in this study is that there is no fixed, essential characteristic of a text that is middlebrow. Instead middlebrow is a pejorative label that is applied to express specific prejudices towards all these things: frequently prejudices towards feminine and domestic themes, to narrative modes that are regarded as outdated, and to a mass, female, middle-class readership. What is meant by ‘middlebrow’ can therefore change with cultural prejudices.⁸ This does not mean that the middlebrow is too amorphous and unstable to be useful; on the contrary, attention to the label middlebrow is vital to exploring the circumstances of these novels’ production and reception. As Nicola Humble persuasively argues, the middlebrow novel is not a newly emerging literary form in the 1920s, but is a critical term emerging as a consequence of contemporary literary developments:

The stylistic and thematic blue-prints of the sort of literature that came to be seen as middlebrow – a particular concentration on feminine aspects of life, a fascination with domestic space, a concern with courtship and marriage, a preoccupation with aspects of class and manners – are little different from the conventions that dominated the mainstream novel throughout the nineteenth century (we need only think of Austen and the Brontës, Trollope and Charlotte M. Yonge). It is not (as many critics would have us assume) that novelists, and particularly female novelists, suddenly started writing meretricious, class-obsessed fripperies in the years after the First World War, but rather that the status of the realist novel was dramatically altered by the coming to public consciousness of the modernist and associated avant-garde movements.⁹

This is a very important point, as it allows us to see that those women writers who were labelled middlebrow, including von Arnim and Taylor, were continuing a tradition of female writing. It is the reception that has changed, from a casual dismissal of ‘women’s books’ to a specific disapprobation and categorization. The perceived femininity of the realist novel is crucial in these hierarchies; as Alison Light has argued, modernism is gendered, associating literary value with masculinity and exile, and devaluing the feminine and domestic as middlebrow.¹⁰ The loss of status for fiction subsequently labelled middlebrow is also linked to the emergence of English literature as an academic discipline in the inter-war period. Douglas Hewitt argues that the natural tendency of the academic critic is to ‘concentrate attention upon what they themselves can do and what the general reader cannot’ – theorize ‘difficult’ works – having ‘the effect of making the tradition of modernism seem not merely one tendency among a number but the only one’.¹¹ This has resulted, until recently, in a highly selective literary-critical landscape that foregrounds modernism and other avant-garde movements above all others.¹²

However, in this period it is the ‘feminine middlebrow novel’, ‘largely read by and in some sense addressed to women readers’, that is the dominant form of literature.¹³ This ‘woman’s novel’ was not a minority interest but made up a large proportion of fiction published from the 1920s to the 1950s. Humble contends that an important reason for the subsequent critical neglect of the major part of fiction published in Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s ‘is that it was largely written and consumed by women’.¹⁴ The majority of people read novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Taylor, Stella Gibbons, Dodie Smith and Nancy Mitford.¹⁵ These are the novels, Humble states, that ‘made the Book-of-the-Month lists in the newspapers, sold in their tens of thousands in book club editions, and packed the shelves of the lending libraries’.¹⁶ This is not, however, supported by quantitative evidence (little being available), and it is important to note that there were of course many other categories of bestseller in this period – the popular romance or the detective novel, for example. Humbles focus is not on the bestseller in general, but on the literature popular with a particular group whose importance as readers was growing in this period: the middle-class woman. This is also the ‘woman’s novel’ as Nicola Beauman’s pioneering study A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914–39 defines it: written by middle-class women for middle-class women, with a clear sense of like speaking to like.¹⁷

One of the female, middle-class readers of Elizabeth von Arnim was Virginia Woolf.¹⁸ Despite writing the vituperative letter ‘Middlebrow’, often quoted as the highbrow stand against the middlebrow, Woolf clearly respected von Arnims work.¹⁹ She wrote: ‘I’m dumbfoundered [sic] by Lady R. If ever hate and scorn were written on a woman’s face I read them on her’s. But then I’m not a novelist; and I’m awfully glad to be mistook; because she is a novelist and commands my deep respect’.²⁰ Ironically it appears that the respect flowed one way: from Blooms-bury Woolf to popular von Arnim. Woolf particularly appreciated von Arnims wit; she wrote to Ethel Smyth, ‘I shall lie and dip into Elizabeth R: who makes me shout with laughter. Some of her sayings are tophole: as good as Dickens’.²¹

Like the women readers described in the review of Elizabeth and her German Garden, this is most definitely leisure reading: she will ‘lie and dip into’ von Arnim. Nicola Humble, in her article ‘Sitting Forward or Sitting Back: Highbrow v. Middlebrow Reading’, argues that this mode of reading is highly significant. For the academic subject of English literature to be recognized as serious, ‘it needed to establish and privilege a very particular way of reading’.²² The professional or highbrow reader literally sits up to study, and actively differentiates this scholarly reading from the leisured sitting (or in Woolf’s case lying) back. Humble contends, therefore, that ‘the distinction between high and middlebrow is primarily one of context rather than content, a context created by the gradual separation in this period of two modes of reading: the professional and the leisured’.²³ It is a challenging contention, and the question that immediately arises is, does the content determine the context? In other words, does the content determine how the text is read? In this book I will argue that it is indeed the way that von Arnim and Taylor have been read – as pleasurable and delightful entertainment – that has relegated them to the middlebrow. Yet their pleasurableness does not mean that their content is simple. I will argue that their use of comedy, irony and complex intertextuality requires an attentive and attuned reader, though she does not need to sit up at a desk. As Humble argues, ‘the ideal reader as imagined by these novels is one for whom literature is an intelligent passion’, but she reads in leisured comfort, in bed, by the fireside and while eating.²⁴ Intelligent, highly involved reading and leisure are not therefore, as the professional literary critic might have it, mutually exclusive.

The question of the way that these novels address the reader and how they are read is central to my study. The feminine middlebrow novel is highly reflexive, filled with depictions of reading and references to other writers and novels, and Humble argues that this elaborate intertextuality establishes a distinct identity for their readers. There is the assumption that the reader will pick up the references to other novels (frequently those of the Brontës and Austen), and ‘such knowledge and interest in fact defines a certain sort of woman: middle-class, intellectually curious, intimately engaged with her reading’.²⁵ The novel therefore defines its own community of readers. This relationship with the reader is also implied by Beauman’s definition of the ‘woman’s novel’. Not all are written by women,

but the majority were, and they all have an unmistakably female tone of voice. They generally have little action and less histrionics – they are about the ‘drama of the un dramatic’, the steadfast dailiness of a life...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 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) and 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 in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Love (1925) and Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season (1961)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index