The Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow

Abstract

In 2001, I had published a book with a rather horrible title – The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism. In the preface, I talked about my experience of reading the middlebrow women’s fiction of this period with my friends at university. If I might self-indulgently quote myself, I said the following:

Studying English – and a great deal of literary theory – at Oxford in the mid-1980s, my circle of female friends developed a cultish taste for what we called ‘girly books’ – those women’s novels of the first half of the century discovered in second-hand bookshops, and just beginning to be reissued by Virago. The generic ‘girly book’ combined an enjoyable feminine ‘trivia’ of clothes, food, family, manners, romance, and so on, with an element of wry self-consciousness that allowed the reader to drift between ironic and complicit readings. A classic of the type would also reveal a maelstrom of thwarted impulse struggling beneath the surface of the text, even a hint of psychosis beneath its ebullient fripperies. We read these books not in a spirit of analysis but of pure self-indulgence: they were at one with the bright red lipstick we decided offered no contradiction to our radical feminist principles. I think we saw them as a form of camp – revelling in their detailing of a mode of feminine existence that seemed eons away from our own. They certainly had no direct bearing on the model of English literature we constructed for the benefit of our finals examiners. Fifteen years later, I no longer see these novels as camp: their concerns seem both more serious and less safely distant, and the world of the women who wrote them and the women who read them is central to the way I now understand the first half of the twentieth century.¹