Reading for Pleasure : Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Asserts that the popular romance offered new possibilities for young working women as social actors and media consumers in early 20th-century Britain.

Young working women were the target audience for popular romance fiction and film in early 20th-century Britain, and as such, were often seen as impressionable consumers of escapist fantasies. Reading for Pleasure complicates this narrative, revealing how women writers, readers, and audiences reimagined the romance.

Reading bestselling novels by Elinor Glyn and E. M. Hull, weekly magazines for girls and young women, and the writings of birth control campaigner Marie Stopes and socialist feminist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, among others, Lise Shapiro Sanders offers an interdisciplinary study of early 20th-century popular romance fiction written by and for women, in the context of the star discourses and fan cultures of silent cinema. She examines how the popular romance resonated with the lives and experiences of young working women, exploring topics such as fashion, beauty, and consumption; desire, pleasure, and affect; sexuality and contraception; feminism, labor, and political activism.

By examining the historical foundations of the popular romance, Reading for Pleasure argues that we can glean important insights into young women’s social and political agency, both in the early 20th century and today.