Women Writers and Painters in British Women’s Novels of the 1940s and 1950s
Creativity, Gender and the Middlebrow
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Conflicting Ideas on the Role of Women in 1940s and 1950s Britain
- 2.1 Female Roles within Society, Home and Marriage
- 2.2 Women’s ‘True’ Social Role: Domesticity, Work and Self-Fulfilment
- 2.3 Contrasting Concepts: Creativity and the Ideal of Womanhood
- 3. British Women Artists and Society
- 3.1 The Presence of Women Painters in Art
- 3.2 Finding a Voice: Women Writers and the Anxiety of Authorship
- 3.3 Gaining Authority: The Voice as Narrative Strategy
- 4. British Women Novelists and the Middlebrow
- 4.1 The Middlebrow: A Social and Cultural Construct
- 4.2 Literary Criticism and the ‘Battle of the Brows’
- 5. Women Writers and Painters in British Women’s Novels of the 1940s and 1950s
- 5.1 “An honest painting would never be finished”: Depictions of Women Painters
- 5.2 “Imagination restless”: Representations of Women Writers
- 6. Conclusion
- 7. Works Cited
Abbreviations
A View of the Harbour – VH
A Wreath of Roses – WR
Angel – A
Jane: Young Author – YA
Less than Angels – LA
Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle – SWU
The Comforters – TC
The Friendly Young Ladies – FYL
The Sandcastle – TS
The abbreviations refer to the editions listed in the bibliography.
Chapter 1 Introduction
Was I not guilty of making ugliness charming? An English sadness like a veil over all I painted, until it became ladylike and nostalgic, governessy, utterly lacking in ferocity, brutality, violence. Whereas in the centre of the earth, in the heart of life, in the core of even everyday things is there not violence, with flames wheeling, turmoil, pain, chaos?
(WR 34)
In her novel A Wreath of Roses, Elizabeth Taylor depicts this inner conflict of her fictional painter Frances, portraying her as a character who has spent her life hiding her own creativity behind a veil of expectations of femininity. Two years before, she expressed her own concerns during her writing process about overstepping the boundaries of society’s expectations placed on her creativity as a female writer:
I am worried about my book. I have turned my back on all that people liked in my other novels – the light thrown on little daily situations […] and there is nothing funny, no wit, no warmth, no children, no irony, no perceptiveness. It is deadly serious. Horribly sad. Cold. Everyone will hate it. […] I have come out of my range – a great mistake – and have swept in violence, brutality, passion, religion, all the things that had been better left out.
(Taylor [1947] 2009: 202)
Those anxieties point to the central concerns of female artists, both painters and writers, in the 1940s and 1950s. With her fictional painter Frances, Elizabeth Taylor reflects the pressure – which she obviously felt deeply herself – to adapt her artistic work to established expectations of female 14creativity, instead of allowing her true feelings to be expressed and put down on paper.
In these passages from her fiction and her non-fiction, Taylor illustrates the predicament and the limitations that women artists had to face at the time. This inner conflict is relevant to a general understanding of female creativity in mid-twentieth-century novels, which is the topic of this dissertation. Its main research question is: how are women writers and painters represented in British women’s novels of the 1940s and 1950s, a time when social norms still significantly restricted women’s social and artistic positions? Within this dissertation, I will refer to both female writers and painters as ‘artists’. In particular, the 1940s and 1950s had a strong impact on the idea of the role of women in society. While women underwent a significant development towards more independence during the war years by entering professions that had previously been carried out by men, after the war, they experienced the idealization of retreating into domesticity. The newly established welfare state saw women as the centre of the family and the saviours of national identity, filling the home with warmth as wives and mothers. The precise ideas of femininity led to a conflict between domesticity and work – the ‘dual role’ – and had an enormous influence on women in the literary field and their writing, until the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s led to radical changes with regard to female writing. In the 1940s and 1950s, novels by British female writers were still often dismissed as ‘middlebrow’, excluding them from serious study since university curricula were dominated by classical and canonical works, which were considered essential for cultural and literary education, with the incipient inclusion of the ‘highbrow’ canon of modernism, although this was still a rather recent development. Yet novels were an art form with which women had managed to not only gain a foothold, but to be truly successful, as they flourished during this period, could be purchased cheaply and were borrowed on a massive scale, especially by a female readership. Nevertheless, their gender and the label ‘middlebrow’ often served as a stigma to exclude women and their novels from being valued and honoured as ‘literary’. The mere fact that they were commercially successful and corresponded to the taste of the masses served as a sign to ‘highbrow’ critics that they could not be sophisticated literature. There was an obvious trend towards labelling fiction by men as ‘serious’, while 15devaluing female fiction as womanly and unsophisticated, often romantic, and not to be taken seriously. For this reason, the novels of those female writers, and especially the topic of female artists portrayed in these novels, are an interesting and in many respects still quite neglected research subject, which I will examine in this dissertation.
Against this historical and cultural background, the preoccupation with female artists in 1940s and 1950s Britain is complex and multilayered. For centuries, society has been concerned with the figure of the artist and the question of artistic creation. But why is this topic such an interesting research subject? Why do artists evoke such a fascination in readers and audiences? Artist characters are not only frequently defined as geniuses with an innate gift, but they are also exceptionally appealing to readers because they deviate from the norm and exist beyond social stereotypes. Apart from the fact that they are perceived as creative and full of ideas, they are often regarded as individuals standing out from the crowd due to their extraordinary nature, their impulsiveness and their independent way of life – there is an attraction of otherness, of diversity, and thus an exciting contrast to a traditional life within the boundaries of morals and codes of behaviour. Artists are so exciting because they seem to turn the predictable world upside down and are thought to have an affinity for chaos. Female artists, who were shaped by precisely defined notions of the role of women in the 1940s and 1950s, stood in even greater contrast to these characteristics of the figure of the artist and are therefore a particularly captivating and complex subject of investigation. Therefore, my aim is to discuss artistic performances in novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Mary Renault and others in order to reconstruct the representation of female art in the 1940s and 1950s. As the dissertation will demonstrate, there are only a few female novelists at this time who focus on the creative endeavours of fictional women writers and painters within their stories. Following a historical overview of the role of women in Britain at this time, I concentrate on the conflict between the concept of creativity and the ideal of womanhood, as well as on the historical positions of women painters and writers in the artistic and literary field. This background is also closely linked to the way in which female writers, often categorized as ‘middlebrow’, used their narrative voices. I will therefore provide both a basis for the narrative voice and explore the impact of the ‘middlebrow’ as a social and cultural construct on women novelists.
16The portrayal of the fictional women artists analysed in this dissertation allows for conclusions to be drawn about the position of real women writers and painters in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s within the power structures of the literary and artistic field, although none of these depictions can be read in an autobiographical or autofictional way. As I will demonstrate, self-authorization is implicit in the very act of authorship, and the novelists who will be examined in this thesis were trying to find a voice with the very act of writing. Their novels were a way to subtly criticize the conventional ideal of femininity and disrupt established thought patterns by portraying women in roles other than domestic ones without transgressing the boundaries of female writing in a way that could be seen as alienating. Based on Susan Lanser’s reflections on the connection between discursive authority and social power, the dissertation will show which narrative techniques and fictional content the women writers used to gain discursive authority and to find a voice despite the limitations they had to face. I start from the assumption that the fictional representations of the female artists in the novels are performative – they function as a form of social action as they have the ability to change the readers’ worldview. Yet how could fictional female artists, with their characteristics so contrasting to the ideal role of women at the time, be portrayed without alienating the readership or running the risk of not being published at all? As will become abundantly clear, the author’s gender matters in regard to the narrative voice applied, since it is not just a narrative technique but it is determined by the social position of the author – in this case, the power structures the women writers found themselves in. Thus, the authority of a voice, namely the combination of social position and rhetorical characteristics, is determined and continuously negotiated between writer, reader and institutions of the literary field. The challenges confronting female authors in terms of their discursive authority due to their social position will become apparent through the historical background that illustrates the expectations of femininity of the time.
In order to fully understand the representations of female creativity of the fictional women writers and painters in the novels, I will first turn to the historical background of the real women writers and painters and their challenges. Although women artists were no longer denied access to the literary marketplace or the art market, they still orientated their writings 17and paintings towards society’s ideals of femininity. How could women writers find a voice, and women painters gain visibility, given the fact that this ideal image stood in such a sharp contrast to the concept of creativity? I will examine those expectations of femininity, drawing on historical documents, advice books and various writers and scholars who had a huge impact on the perception of what women were destined to be and what they were considered capable of intellectually and creatively. In The Art of Being a Woman (1951), for instance, Amabel Williams-Ellis points out that creativity pursued seriously required a lot of time and concentration, neither of which was structurally available in the traditional role of the woman in the 1940s and 1950s, considered as housewife and mother. Even the new development towards the ‘dual role’ in the 1950s, which signified a new acceptance of girls entering a career alongside their domestic role, was primarily characterized by professions that required qualities considered typically feminine, which will be reflected, for example, by examining the genre of the career novel flourishing in the 1950s. Apart from the structural problems that made it difficult for women to develop their creativity freely, women were still influenced by voices from the past and present that denied them the ability to be creative, such as William Lecky, who claimed that women were intellectually incapable of achieving the kind of creativity and genius that a man would be capable of ([1869] 1919: 358). Campbell and the women at the conference of ‘the feminine point of view’ in 1952, for instance, argued that the attitude towards women was still a pejorative one that “[weakened] their self-confidence and [lessened] their ability to make a creative contribution to the world” (Campbell 1952: 23). There seemed to be an almost transhistorical trend that continuously stereotyped women in the field of art as lacking in creativity, which had a massive impact on their self-confidence as artists and their actual creative work.
Details
- Pages
- 316
- Publication Year
- 2026
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631945940
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631945957
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631945933
- DOI
- 10.3726/b23494
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2026 (July)
- Keywords
- Middlebrow novels British women writers female writing women painters women writers women in arts 1950s 1940s Britain female creativity women and society narrative strategies gender metafiction romance social novel
- Published
- Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2026. 316 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
Biographical notes
Leonie Kappus (Author)
Leonie Kappus studied Modern Languages, Cultures, and Business at the University of Giessen, where she focused on English and American Studies, Business Administration, and Bohemian Studies. She later completed her doctorate in English Literature at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research explores twentieth-century British literature, especially in relation to gender, creativity, and cultural representation.
