Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925 — 2011 ·

By Martin Hipsky

“Martin Hipsky’s book is a smart and vitally important analysis of the British romance novel and a model of incisive, balanced criticism. It requires us to rethink not only the romance genre, but also the profound ways that genre engages with modernism, melodrama, imperialism, and the history of publishing.”

Elizabeth Outka — author of Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic

“Martin Hipsky’s definitive account of women’s popular romance is at once a masterful history of the genre, a powerful critique of modernism, and a winning story of the beguiling literary personae that made romance such a scandalous triumph in this moment. Hipsky’s knowledge of these writers is matchless, he is a visionary theorist, and his last pages are nothing short of a must-read rethink of modernism itself.”

Jesse Matz — author of The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction

Today’s mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since.

Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both “low modern” and “high modernist” British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Rebecca West, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.

Martin Hipsky is a professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is the author of numerous articles on British modernism, postmodern fiction, and popular film.