Dr. Martin Hipsky's Modernism and the
Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925, recently published by Ohio University Press, has been described as "a must-read rethink of modernism itself." I asked Marty if he'd like to visit Teach Me Tonight to tell us a bit more about his new book, and he agreed. I should note that although he describes it as a "study of the history of the modern romance novel," his focus on such an early period in the history of "the modern romance novel" does mean that some of the popular romances he studies (including Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan and Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks) would not be classified as romances according to the RWA definition, although many others would.
Martin
Hipsky
Ohio
Wesleyan University
mahipsky@owu.edu
As a scholar of British and Irish literary modernism, I first became interested in the romance novel of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century when I was writing about the London avant-garde and Wyndham Lewis's journal Blast (1914-15). Lewis's fiery cultural manifestos (co-signed by Ezra Pound) featured the name of celebrity romance-writer Marie Corelli, whom they took to be a totem of Edwardian popular culture, and a sort of demotic figure for cultural tendencies that they, as a self-proclaimed vanguard, were rebelling against. I discovered that (as readers of this blog may know) Corelli had been publishing best-selling mystical romances since the mid-1880s, and in 1895, with her blockbuster romance The Sorrows of Satan, had sold the most copies of any novel in the history of Britain to that point.
So
I read some of Corelli's romances, and she became the inspiration of
a research project: to investigate the most successful romance novels
written by women in the same years that witnessed the emergence of
what we now call high modernist culture, and to consider the
relationship -- as perceived then, but more importantly as legible
now, with the benefit of historical hindsight -- between this
ultra-popular mode and the experimental narratives of such canonical
figures as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, James
Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence.
My
study offers interpretations of eleven top-selling books, all
women-authored romances, in the years around the turn of the British
twentieth century. This set of romances includes works by Mary Ward
("Mrs. Humphry Ward"), Marie Corelli, Emma Orczy, Elinor
Glyn, Florence Barclay, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull.
For a list of the eleven romances I have chosen as my primary
interpretive focus (a limited selection, as most of these eight
writers published a number of romances), you can look at the Works
Cited list below.
Although
I note the occasional condescension that the modernist writers,
predictably enough, expressed toward these women romance-writers,
that is not the cultural dynamic of interest here. Rather, I argue
that certain "high" modernist works, for all their
intellectual challenges, nonetheless evinced a powerful force of
affect in parallel with the affective appeal popular romances by
women. While the parallel was not conscious on either side of the
romance/modernism divide, what was conscious on the part of the two
sets of writers, in different ways, was the project of creative
reaction against the literary realism that was so esteemed by the
(mostly male) cultural arbiters of the late Victorian and Edwardian
periods. This parallel, I argue, has powerful implications about the
unfulfilling experience of living amid an often alienating and
isolating modernity.
Modernism
and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain,
then, is not primarily a celebration of either select high modernist
works, or select romance novels of the late-Victorian-to-modernist
period. It is instead an attempt to explain the unprecedented (and
often forgotten) appeal of that era’s secular, women-authored
romance. As I say in the preface to the study, between 1885 and 1925
these romances loomed as a series of pinnacles along the highest
plateau of popular British (in most cases, also North American, and
indeed global anglophone) reading. For this socio-historical reason
and many others (including the pleasures of discovery that these
romances can still bring to their readers), I believe that this group
of romances constitutes a very important part of recent anglophone
literary-cultural history. I hope that the book makes some
contribution to our understanding of the vast phenomenon of the
woman-authored romance reading of our not-too-distant past.
Works
Cited
Barclay,
Florence. The Rosary.
New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1909.
Corelli,
Marie. Innocent: Her
Fancy and His Fact. New
York: A. L. Burton Company, 1914.
_____.
The Sorrows of Satan
[1895]. Ed. by Peter
Keating. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
_____.
The Treasure of
Heaven.. New York:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1906.
Cross,
Victoria [Vivian Cory]. Anna
Lombard. New York:
Kensington Press, 1901.
Dell,
Ethel. The Way of an
Eagle [1912]. London:
Virago, 1996.
Glyn,
Elinor. Three Weeks.
London: Duckworth, 1907.
Hull,
E. M. The Sheik
[1919]. Philadelphia: Pine Street Press, 2001.
Orczy,
Baroness [Emmuska]. The
Scarlet Pimpernel [1905]
“Popular Edition.” London: Greening
and Co., 1909.
Ward,
Mary Augusta. Lady
Rose’s Daughter. New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1903.
_____.
Robert Elsmere [1888].
Edited by Clyde de L. Ryals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1967.
