Afterword

This section offers a detailed conclusion to the volume as a whole suggesting that the case studies within reveal the centrality of processes of negotiation, or ‘offsetting’ in women’s encounters with cinema culture. Again and again in short stories, novels, criticism and serialisations, both cinemagoing characters and the creators of film fictions use cinema-going as a vehicle for working through a variety of pressures and conflicts in women’s interwar experience. The pleasures of popular culture are offset against the problematic and restrictive representations that this culture contained. Equally, the social and physical freedoms that cinemas as public leisure spaces offered women are offset against the ways in which cinema-going conversely regulated their movement, made their public presence spectacular and produced new pressures to conform to standardized modes of gendered, class-inflected and regional subjectivities. The afterword draws these ideas together, suggesting new directions in further research into interwar literary cultures of cinemagoing.

Off to the Pictures: Cinema, Fiction and Interwar Culture

The chapter outlines the critical and contextual foundations for the case study chapters that follow, establishing in greater depth the three interlocking contexts of moviegoing, print culture and modernity in interwar Britain. It offers an overview of the interrelationship between key framing contexts that inform the coordinates of the study, considering British cinema culture alongside the interwar publishing industry for women’s writing, read in relation to the changing texture of women’s everyday lives in British modernity alongside a more detailed consideration of the intersections between critical explorations of film reception and intermediality.

Elinor Glyn: Intermedial Romance and Authorial Stardom

This chapter explores the career of bestselling author Elinor Glyn, a figure who moved with relatively unique fluidity across a very broad spectrum of these different forms, as a writer, adapted and filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the underexplored final stage of her film career in the early 1930s in Britain. It delves into Glyn’s archives, considering how archival sources produce a new mapping of the strategies that she and her associates formulated to break into UK cinema culture, developed on the premise that one could create an intermedial star identity through popular culture, and through the manipulation of international discourses on femininity and romance. Such non-filmic traces and materials enlarge and illuminating Glyn’s star image, suggesting the framework that she was trying to construct around her films as a vehicle for her brand and ideas. While Glyn was not wholly unique as a literary/filmic star figure during this period, the chapter argues that the fluidity of her movement across diverse forms of labour, and her creation of new forms and modes of creative influence in cinema culture, offers a distinct new access point to understandings of women’s writing, film fictions and selfhood during this period.

Wander, Watch, Repeat: Jean Rhys and Cinema

This explores how modernist literature in the late 1920s and in the 1930s engaged with and conceptualised cinema culture, focusing on Jean Rhys’s early novels as a case study. It first examines her attention to urban geography and female movement, considering how she mapped city spaces through cinema visits. Rhys’s novels use cinema sites to construct a layered geography of memory and present experience for her female characters, mediated through locally specific choices in cinema venues. Second, it considers the relationship between Rhys’s literary style and cinema, considering how her early fiction forged intermedial connections between cinematic and literary techniques to describe these cinematic encounters and interconnect them with wider concerns in her fictions about the performative nature of women’s public bodily presence within the urban environment. Third, it considers Rhys’s use of certain types of cinematic texts and genres as a way of reflecting back on these issues, considering the relationship between genre structures and their modes of cinematic exhibition, and Rhys’s careful structuring of the everyday experiences of her heroines. Here, the chapter explores how Rhys’s references to comedy and serial films especially opened up a unique vantage point on women, visibility and value.

Middlebrow Modernity: Class, Cinema-going and Selfhood

The chapter explores the presence of cinema in middlebrow literary fictions, looking at how cinemagoing features in the depiction of middle-class life in feminine middlebrow literature specifically in novels by Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Bowen, Stella Gibbons and others. It argues that such writings crafted references to cinema fictions and cinema cultures as a tool for constructing a gendered cultural commentary on middle-class life in the interwar period. They used cinema to influence, invoke or challenge readers’ attitudes to questions of British women’s middle-class identities, duties and social place. Middlebrow writers used the act of going to the pictures as a fictional arena for interrogating the real-world impact of cinematic leisure cultures. They did so in a period during which the formation of public and private class-based identities was enacted in part through leisure and consumer activities. Watching the screen, watching others around you and being conscious of one’s self being watched in that space emerges as a recurrent theme in these texts. In this way, writing about cinema-going opened a window on to the complexities and pressures inherent within gendered and class identities by enabling filmic representations to blend and interact with the fictionalisation of being inside the cinema space.

Screen Fantasies: Tie-ins and the Short Story

This chapter explores short-story film fictions, tie-ins fan magazines stories and novelettes. It considers how they addressed and represented female spectators, particularly through the genre of romance. Such stories offered a range of different forms of screen fantasy that encouraged an active, intermedial readership. Film magazines in particular provided platforms for consuming fiction in which women were exposed to a diversity of forms of female representations, within the fictions themselves but also within the wider context of the reading material. Offering female readers escapist and aspirational models of womanhood through romance and adventure genre tropes, the tie-in short story constitutes a textual element that cannot be read in isolation from the intermedial framework of the magazine as a whole. Fiction was one tool amidst a range of content across the magazine articulating ideas and images of modern femininity. Magazine content created star images through representations of cosmetics, dress, domestic labour and public and private life, in advertising, interviews and images. The chapter will argue that varied models of womanhood could be tried out and tested through fictional forms positioned amidst these intersecting discourses, positing female identities as a form of masquerade, tied to the image of the female star.

Film Talk: C. A. Lejeune and the Female Film Critic

This chapter examines how early film criticism evolved as a distinct branch of women’s interwar ‘film talk’ through writers such as Iris Barry and Dilys Powell, taking C. A. Lejeune as a central case study. It explores Lejeune’s early writing in her The Manchester Guardian column from 1922 to 1928 and early work for the Observer. The chapter looks at developments and trends in her writing, considering how her columns produced a journalistic mode of film talk coloured specifically by debates and concerns about gender. This is read through Lejeune’s specific discussions about notions of women’s cinema, women and stardom, and female spectatorship. Gender shaped and shadowed much of her critical discourse, not only through the gendered associations of the topics she discussed – especially stardom – but through her approach to negotiating her own gender identity as a professional film critic, and the experimentation she enacted with crafting and refining her journalistic voice as a distinctly film-based writer. The chapter explores the stylistic strategies of Lejeune’s column writing, examining her use of literary techniques and fictional frameworks as a way to turn her attention far more explicitly to the topic of women and cinema.

Introduction

The introduction established the scope and aims of the volume, and its focus upon the intersection of women and modernity, women and cinema and women and British interwar print culture. It sets up the questions guiding the volume as a whole: What roles did literature play in producing a female film culture from outside the film industry proper? What attention did this literature give to women’s uses of and responses to film fictions, cinema-going practices and cinema spaces? What do literary inflections of a gendered movie culture suggest about the roles that cinema played in informing and structuring notions of selfhood and self-fashioning for British women at this time?