Woman's Weekly and Lower Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918-1958 - (Liverpool English Texts and Studies) by Eleanor Reed (Hardcover)

About the Book

Showcasing a brand-new approach to surveying a popular domestic magazine, Woman's Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918-1958 reshapes the parameters of the literary field. In doing so, it renews understandings of lower middle-class culture, during a period in which the lower middle classes gained increasing prominence

Book Synopsis

A unique intersection between periodical and literary scholarship, and class and gender history, this book showcases a brand-new approach to surveying a popular domestic magazine. Reading Woman's Weekly alongside titles including Good Housekeeping, My Weekly, Peg's Paper and Woman's Own, and works by authors including Dot Allan, E.M. Delafield, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, it positions the publication within both the contemporary magazine market and the field of literature more broadly, redrawing the parameters of that field as it approaches the domestic magazine as a literary genre in its own right. Between 1918 and 1958, Woman's Weekly targeted a lower middle-class readership: broadly, housewives and unmarried clerical workers on low incomes, who viewed or aspired to view themselves as middle-class. Examining the magazine's distinctively lower middle-class treatment of issues including the First World War's impact on gender, the status of housewives and working women, women's contribution to the Second World War effort, and Britain's post-war economic and social recovery, this book supplies fresh and challenging insights into lower middle-class culture, during a period in which Britain's lower middle classes were gaining prominence, and middle-class lifestyles were undergoing rapid and radical change.

Review Quotes

'Attending to the discourse surrounding lower-middle-class domestic identity and to the literature that represents and serves that identity construction, this is a major contribution to studies of women's print culture and feminist modernist studies more broadly.' Barbara Green, Journal of European Periodical Studies

About the Author

Eleanor Reed is a Lecturer in English at Brunel University.