This feminist investigation of the works of Clemence Dane joins the growing body of research into the relationship of female-authored texts to the ideology and cultural hegemony of the Edwardian and inter-war period. An amalgam of single-author study and thematic period analysis, through sustained cultural engagement, this book explores Dane’s journalism, drama and fiction to interrogate a range of issues: inter-war women’s writing, the Middlebrow, feminism, (homo) sexuality, liberal politics, domesticity, and concepts of the spinster. It examines form and a range of fictional genres: drama, bildungsroman, detective fiction, historical saga and gothic fiction. It relates back to the genre writing of comparable authors. These include Rosamond Lehmann, Vita Sackville-West, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Dorothy Strachey, Dodie Smith, Rachel Ferguson, May Sinclair, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Daphne Du Maurier, G.B.Stern, and detective writers: Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Gladys Mitchell, Marjorie Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. Offering a picture of an era, focalised through Dane and contextualised through her journalism and the work of her female peers, it argues that Dane is often markedly more radically feminist than these contemporaries. She engages with broad issues of social justice irrespective of gender and her humanity is demonstrated through her sympathetic representations of marginalised characters of both sexes. However, she most specifically evidences a gender politics consistent with the fragmented and multifarious essentialist feminism that emerged following the Great War, which esteemed ‘womanly’ qualities of care and mothering but simultaneously valued female autonomy, single status and professionalism. Adopting the critical paradigms of domestic modernism and women‘s liminality, the book will particularly focus on the trajectories of Dane’s extraordinary modern heroines, who possess qualities of altruism, candour, integrity, imagination, intuition, resilience and rebelliousness. Over the course of her work, these fictional women increasingly challenge oppressive normative forms of domesticity, traversing physical thresholds to create alternative domesticities in self-defining living and working spaces.
McDonald
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Introduction
Chapter 1: Clemence Dane and the inter-war political, cultural and literary context
Modernism and the Middlebrow
Feminist consciousness
Social ills and liberal solutions
Chapter 2: women’s themes in inter-war drama
Women in the modern world
Contesting masculine abuses in plays about the past
Interpreting literary history
Chapter 3: Imperilled identities and submerged sexualities: romantic pathology in the coming-of-age novel 1917-1927
Lesbian loss: the amor impossibilia
Romantic yearning in heterosexual contexts
Chapter 4: Domestic choices: companionate marriage or living as a seule dame. Rejecting romance in gothic and saga writing 1924 – 1938
Fantastical fiction and female visionary experience
Family chronicles: women’s journeys from domestication to professionalism
Chapter 5: Subverting the models of golden-age detective fiction
Detectives, villainy and masculinities
Investigative women
Foregrounding the woman’s plot
Conclusion
Louise McDonald received her PH.D. in English on the topic of the writings of Clemence Dane at the University of Leicester. She is currently senior lecturer in English at Newman University. Her publications include: 'Clemence Dane's Fantastical Fiction and Feminist Consciousness' in Ehland, Christoph and Wachter, Cornelia (2016) Middlebrow and Gender 1980-1945 (Brill Rodopi), ‘Softening Svengali: Film Transformations of Trilby and Cultural Change’ in Cooke, Simon and Goldman, Paul (eds.) (2016) George du Maurier: Illustrator, Author, Critic London: Ashgate and ‘From Victorian to Postmodern Negation: Enlightenment Culture in Thackeray’s and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon’ in Bloom, Abigail Burnham and Pollock, Mary Sanders (2011) Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation, New York: Cambria Press, She has also contributed articles on Clemence Dane and her work to The Literary Encyclopedia, Volume 1.2.1.08, Baldick, Chris and Childs, Peter (eds.) (2017) English Writing and Culture of the early Twentieth Century, 1945-present.
