Modern French literature is strongly identified with ‘high’ culture, with complex and challenging philosophies, experimental forms and sophisticated eloquence. France has celebrated somewhat less its rich seam of popular literature – from the late nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton to today's Harlequin romance series – but this too has begun to be studied rather than simply deplored. However, between what Bourdieu termed the ‘restricted’ sphere of the literary field, in which the value of a literary work is essentially symbolic (‘high’ literature), and the commercial sphere of the mass market (‘low’), there lies a wide domain composed of all those hybrid novels read by most readers for a – usually unexamined – mix of reasons. These include the desire to be entertained, the wish to expand one's own knowledge and understanding, the appeal of venturing, through simulated experience, beyond the confines of the self. The novels that satisfy this demand are beguiling but serious, pleasurable but instructive, singular – not formulaic – but accessible. They constitute the subfield of the middlebrow. So far, the question of what the average regular reader reads has scarcely figured in French literary criticism, despite a growing interest in cultural hierarchies. This book, then, represents the first extended study of the middlebrow French novel.

My focus is mainly on women writers and readers. Of course men also read and, as we shall see, write fiction that is classified as middlebrow, and men's middlebrow would be a worthy subject in its own right. But as I shall explain, since the beginnings of the middlebrow novel in Belle Époque France, women have formed a majority of the nation's reading public, and this feminisation of reading has become more rather than less marked in the contemporary era. Once we define the literature of an age in terms of ‘what did most people choose to read?’, women as readers and as writers immediately assume a more central place. Moreover, if middlebrow as a cultural category is disdained by highbrow critics, this is partly because the ‘brows’ of culture have become implicitly gendered. Across Western cultures, and conspicuously in France, modernism has been the dominant aesthetic of high culture since (at least) the beginning of the twentieth century.