Abstract
In July 1905, in his monthly review of British fiction for the Mercure de France, the French literary critic Henry-D Davray stated: ‘At the moment, on the other side of the Channel, morality and public opinion are changing. Changes occur, hence the inconsistency in literary efforts, the lack of unity in a movement to renew the old frames and old formulas’.1 The beginning of the twentieth century saw the emergence of genres that catered to a wide range of literary tastes. The popular novels of Marie Corelli and Mrs Humphry Ward achieved unprecedented sales, while Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove appealed to a more select audience. This chapter discusses the emergence, diversification and reception of British mass-market literature in the early decades of the twentieth century by examining Henry-D Davray’s lettres anglaises in the influential French literary monthly Mercure de France.2 An expert on British literature, Davray regularly contributed to the Mercure de France, translated the works of H G Wells, Frank Harris, Edmund Gosse and Oscar Wilde and edited the short-lived bilingual periodical Anglo-French Review.3 His reports on British fiction are a little-known set of evidence for the changes in early twentieth-century British literature through his remarks on new works, and his comments on the social changes that influenced mass-market literary production in Britain at this time.
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Notes
In spite of Davray’s importance as a literary journalist and cultural mediator, his contributions to the Mercure de France have not yet received thorough attention. Richard Hibbitt briefly discusses Davray’s lettres anglaises in Hibbitt, R, ‘Entente Asymétrique?: Franco-British Literary Exchanges in 1908’, in Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 1880–1940: Channel Packets, Radford, A and V Reid (eds) (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), 34–51.
Habermann, I, Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier, and the Symbolic Form of Englishness (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 35.
‘Le Mercure est un lion gros et gras, qui avait, il n’y a pas quatre ans, trois fois plus d’abonnés que la NRF, qui augmente chaque mois son tirage’ (Paulhan, J, ‘Letter to Roger Martin du Gard, 6 July 1927’, in Choix de lettres Aury, D and J-C Zylberstein (eds), 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 124).
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© 2015 Birgit Van Puymbroeck
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Puymbroeck, B.V. (2015). Cross-Channel Mediations. In: Macdonald, K., Singer, C. (eds) Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486776_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486776_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50388-9
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