The first full study of Clemence Dane’s literary criticism for Good Housekeeping.
Clemence Dane and Good Housekeeping: Modernity and Common Reading examines Dane’s tenure as a literary critic for Good Housekeeping between 1923 and 1933, firmly locating it within a vibrant interwar periodical culture. By expressing confidence in a shared literary heritage, modelling enjoyment of a wide variety of literature and linking women’s reading habits to the revitalisation of national literary culture, Dane’s serial essays implicitly challenged academic and modernist approaches to literature. Moreover, Dane’s monthly book pages, in dialogue with book authors and with other feminist contributors, fulfilled and exceeded Good Housekeeping’s mission by preparing women for their new responsibilities as British citizens. Dane’s journalism sheds new light on the heterogeneity intrinsic to quality domestic magazines and the roles they played in fostering women’s multi-faceted modern identities. Stella Deen demonstrates that Dane’s corpus of Good Housekeeping essays makes a significant contribution to the conceptualisation of the common reader and to the history of twentieth-century literary criticism.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Clemence Dane, Modernity and Interwar Periodical Culture
1. Books That Endure
2. Common Readers and the Varied Pleasures of Reading
3. The History of Ourselves: Cultural, Rural and Matriarchal Legacies
4. The Boundary Stones of Belief
5. The Voice of Women
Works Cited
Index
Stella Deen is Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. Her research focuses on literary journalism, periodical culture, and middlebrow and modernist studies. Recent publications include 'Remarkable Obscurity: Group Portraits of Professional Women Between the Wars' in Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance (forthcoming, 2024); 'Cultivating Citizen Readers: Clemence Dane's Historical Essays in Good Housekeeping' (Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 2019); and 'Clemence Dane's Literary Criticism for Good Housekeeping: Cultivating a Small, Comical, Lovable, Eternal Public of Book Lovers' (The Edinburgh Companion to Women's Print Media in Interwar Britain, 1918-1939, 2017). Her first book, Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture 1914-45, was published in 2002.
