Reading for Pleasure

Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Reading for Pleasure

Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

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Description

Asserts that the popular romance offered new possibilities for young working women as social actors and media consumers in early 20th-century Britain.

Young working women were the target audience for popular romance fiction and film in early 20th-century Britain, and as such, were often seen as impressionable consumers of escapist fantasies. Reading for Pleasure complicates this narrative, revealing how women writers, readers, and audiences reimagined the romance.

Reading bestselling novels by Elinor Glyn and E. M. Hull, weekly magazines for girls and young women, and the writings of birth control campaigner Marie Stopes and socialist feminist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, among others, Lise Shapiro Sanders offers an interdisciplinary study of early 20th-century popular romance fiction written by and for women, in the context of the star discourses and fan cultures of silent cinema. She examines how the popular romance resonated with the lives and experiences of young working women, exploring topics such as fashion, beauty, and consumption; desire, pleasure, and affect; sexuality and contraception; feminism, labor, and political activism.

By examining the historical foundations of the popular romance, Reading for Pleasure argues that we can glean important insights into young women's social and political agency, both in the early 20th century and today.

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List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reading for Pleasure
1. From Modern Girl to Modern Woman: The Romance Weekly
· Periodicals and the New Reading Public
· “Film Fame or Love?”: Glamour and Fashionability on Page, Stage, and Screen
· Fantasy in Fiction and Film Narrative
· Girls Growing Up: Navigating Modern Womanhood
2. Scenes of Desire: The "Sex Novel" and Sensory Pleasure in Fashion and Film
· Fashioning Romance: Lady Duff Gordon's Lucile Ltd. and “Madame” Elinor Glyn
· Affect and the Pleasures of Romantic Mise-en-Scène in Beyond the Rocks
· The Shopgirl and the “It Girl”: Autonomy and Adaptability in It
· “Dressing Tastefully on Limited Means”: Lucile's Advice to Working Women
3. Consuming Orientalism: The Sheik and the Desert Romance
· Commodifying Orientalism
· The “Eastern Scene”: Women, Travel, and the Desert Picturesque
· The Fabric of Fantasy in E. M. Hull's The Sheik and The Sons of the Sheik
· “In Reply to Yours”: Stars and Fans
4. Young Women, Sexual Agency, and Contraception: Marriage and Motherhood in the Writings of Marie Stopes
· “The Heart's Desire”: Married Love and the Language of Romance
· Wise Parents, Radiant Mothers: Letters from Readers in Mother England
· Contraception and Eugenics in The Race, Our Ostriches, and Maisie's Marriage
5. The Politics of Dress and Activism: The Working-Class Romance
· Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's Socialist Feminism: Poetry and Periodical Culture
· “Silk, Satin, Muslin, Rags”: The Anti-Romance and the Affective Politics of Dress in This Slavery
· “Lights-Fairyland-Romance!”: Hindle Wakes
6. Conclusion: What We Read and Why We Read It

Notes
Index

Product details

Published	03 Sep 2026
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Pages	248
ISBN	9798765141625
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	33 b&w illustrations
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Lise Shapiro Sanders

Lise Shapiro Sanders is Professor of English Liter…

In this deeply researched study of modernity's popular romances and their affective pleasures, Lise Shapiro Sanders introduces us to a wide range of forms addressed to the young working woman – silent films, fan magazines, sex novels, desert romances, birth control literature, anti-romances, and popular romance weeklies for “mill girls” and “business girls” (packed with fashion photographs and illustrations, beauty columns, and advice). Reading for Pleasure takes the intermediality of romance seriously by noticing how a vibrant, dazzling, sensuous cultural world was built through the circulation of ideas about desire, glamour, and fantasy among media forms. The pleasures for Sanders' own readers are many, including access to a new view of modernity that centers the young working woman and her consumption.

Barbara Green, Professor of English and Gender Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA
True to its title, Reading for Pleasure is a deeply enjoyable and brilliantly illuminating study of popular romance in the interwar period in Britain. Engaging with neglected archives and texts for and about working women, Lise Sanders shows that popular romance was an intermedial phenomenon - involving novels, periodicals, films, beauty products, and fashion. In doing so, Sanders demonstrates that the world of popular romance was a key site for representing and envisioning women's sexual, social, and political agency. Reading for Pleasure deftly traces the historical and cultural dynamics of a profoundly influential arena of cultural production.

Elizabeth M. Sheehan, Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University, USA
Reading for Pleasure offers an original and richly researched exploration of romance as an intermedial form, examining how working-class women and girls in early twentieth-century Britain consumed and negotiated popular texts across print and screen. Beautifully illustrated and eminently readable, it frames young female consumers as skilled navigators of popular culture, affirming their agency and imaginative lives. Shapiro Sanders' study offers a vital contribution to the history of girlhood and media culture, and will be an essential resource for scholars and anyone interested in the roots of contemporary romance forms.

Lisa Stead, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Swansea University, UK