If the concept of the middlebrow has recently gained some critical traction, this is largely due to work on women's writing and reading practices in interwar Britain and North America. The word ‘middlebrow’ itself dates from the 1920s, when the growing middle classes created a new type of demand for cultural products that were both entertaining and serious, accessible and imbued with cultural value. In literature, this produced a flourishing of the novel that, as Nicola Humble puts it, ‘straddles the divide between trashy romance or thriller on the one hand, and the philosophically or formally challenging novel on the other’ (2001, 11). Women made up the majority of the British reading public (Bloom, 2002, 51), and women writers found a ready market for novels that mirrored and anatomised their situation through compelling stories. In France, as we have seen, similar conditions had begun to appear before the First World War, and led to a vibrant market in middlebrow women's writing. Colette represents a bridge between the pre- and post-war feminine middlebrow, as a writer whose popularity with women readers begins at the Belle Époque and continues to address the changing configurations of social and emotional experience throughout the interwar years. Yet, beyond the case of Colette, it seems remarkably hard to find any French equivalent to the interwar women’s novel in Britain.

In this chapter I want to address more broadly the interwar middlebrow in France, starting with a comparative perspective that will seek to understand why there appears to be no phenomenon in France akin to the remarkable proliferation of female-authored, market pleasing, durably readable fiction that occurred in Britain at this time, and which has since been recuperated for a contemporary female public by the publishing imprints Virago and Persephone. The situation of women in the neighbouring if culturally distinct nations of Britain and France was in many ways similar, as were developments in the British and French publishing industries. Yet the French interwar literary middlebrow is much harder to identify, and has certainly been far less – if at all – recognised and studied than its UK equivalent.

Women's middlebrow in interwar Britain

In Britain, the interwar years witnessed the proliferation of a particular kind of novel that stood ‘in the vast space between lowbrow fiction, designed merely to entertain, and highbrow works, increasingly alienated from a common reference of values’ (Bracco, 1993, 12).