Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines: Ultra-Modern Eves [1 ed.] 1138285625, 9781138285620

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Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women’s magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book’s analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity’s broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines extends recent research into modernism’s circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women’s magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism’s public profile. Alice Wood is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, UK.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature









Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines

Alice Wood

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Alice Wood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-28562-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26551-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix 1

1

Mediating Modernity

24

2

Modernism in Fashion

67

3

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment

106

4

Modernist Reputations

142

Coda

176

Appendices Primary Sources and their Locations Good Housekeeping’s Reading Questionnaire (1929) Bibliography Index

181 181 183 193 205

Figures

1.1 Front cover, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927 1.2 P. L. Garbutt, ‘Washing Day, 1934 Style’, Good Housekeeping, July 1934 1.3 Front cover, Good Housekeeping, May 1930 (discolouration at bottom and right edge due to mildew damage) 1.4 Advertisement for Harper’s Bazaar in Punch, 2 October 1929 1.5 Front cover, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934 2.1 Fashion plate, Vogue, Early May 1924 2.2 John Kettelwell, ‘When Diaghileff Calls the Tune’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 15 June 1927 2.3 Man Ray photograph beside Beatrice Mathieu, ‘Paris 1935’, Harper’s Bazaar, October 1934 4.1 ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’, Vogue, Early April 1925 4.2 ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’, Vogue, Late May 1924 4.3 Virginia Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, Harper’s Bazaar, January 1930 4.4 Gertrude Stein, ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’, Harper’s Bazaar, June 1933 A.1 ‘The Result of Our Reading Questionnaire’, Good Housekeeping, March 1929

38 45 47 53 56 71 88 93 143 152 159 167 184

Acknowledgements

This book extends from research I have pursued while employed at the University of Portsmouth and De Montfort University. I gratefully acknowledge funding from both institutions to enable me to visit archives and conferences, and the award of De Montfort University Research Leave in 2018 to work on this book. I am indebted to Jane Dowson for her initial encouragement to embark on this project, and to numerous colleagues, scholars, and students for fruitful conversations during its evolution. In particular, I would like to thank Fiona Hackney and Rod Rosenquist for their keen editorial eyes and insightful feedback on two earlier articles that inform the thinking behind this monograph, and, among others, Cathy Clay, Faye Hammill, Lise Jaillant, Vike Plock, Andrew Thacker, and Emma West for sharing pertinent discussions, suggestions, and questions on its topic at conferences and seminars. My sincere thanks to Bryony Reece and Michelle Salyga at Routledge for their patience and assistance during this monograph’s production. The anonymous readers of the proposal provided generous and astute advice that has subsequently shaped this book’s structure and approach. All flaws in its execution are my own. Finally, special thanks to family and friends for the practical support without which the writing could not have been completed; to Alexei Lambley-Steel, who has lived graciously with this project too and sustained me through it; and to Hannah, who arrived in the middle of things bringing the best kind of disruption. Segments of Chapters 2 and 4 were first published in an article titled ‘Modernism, Exclusivity, and the Sophisticated Public of Harper’s Bazaar (UK)’ in Modernist Cultures, 11.3 (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and I gratefully acknowledge the right to modify and republish that material here. Images of Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar are used by kind permission of Hearst Magazines UK. I also warmly thank Hearst Magazines UK for permission to publish a transcription of ‘The Result of Our Reading Questionnaire’ from Good Housekeeping (March 1929). Images from Harper’s Bazaar © The British Library Board. Images from Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Images from Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial © Mary Evans Picture Library. Advertisement for Harper’s Bazaar from Punch © Alice Wood/TopFoto,

x Acknowledgements used by permission of Topham Partners LLP. Excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’ in Harper’s Bazaar (January 1930) reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. Excerpt from THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein, copyright ©1933 by Gertrude Stein and renewed 1961 by Alice B. Toklas, used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction

For the English writer R. H. Mottram reflecting on urban modernity in Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial on 26 December 1928, the contemporary moment would appear to later generations as ‘the vague, experimental dawn of the world!’1 In ‘Seeing through Piccadilly’, Mottram envisions future descendants exclaiming at the sight of present-day London: ‘How curious! How thrilling it must have been to live in the Twentieth Century.’2 Exploring the present from the imaginary vantage point of the future, this Eve article captures the now clichéd framing of the early twentieth century as an aesthetic and historical turning point. Mottram, in common with many contributors to interwar British women’s magazines, regards his era as a new dawn characterized by experimentalism, exhilaration, and bewilderment. Observing the present in relation to the past, the sculptor and travel-writer Clare Sheridan records similarly intense, divergent reactions to interwar Britain in the May 1933 issue of Harper’s Bazaar: ‘To anyone […] who was moulded in pre-war social conditions, modern society is extremely striking’, she asserts, ‘Never has such a gulf existed between two generations. The “pre-wars” lament, the “post-wars” mock’.3 Later in the article, however, Sheridan casts doubt on this perception of modern society’s unprecedented change by identifying aspects of English life, particularly with regard to gender and power, that remain constant: ‘there’s the Eton and Harrow match; same little and big boys in silk hats, proudly parading sisters in garden party frocks. No change’.4 Diversely conceptualized as a break from or an extension of the past, the present era is repeatedly figured by these and other interwar women’s magazines as a conduit for new pleasures, diversions, and challenges. The four commercial women’s magazines surveyed in this study probed the nature and scope of modernity in relation to a range of contemporary social and cultural phenomena, from changing gender relations, new technologies, and new media, to fashion, celebrity culture, and modernist literature and art. This book investigates responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in women’s magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. It takes as its focus four women’s periodicals published in Britain during the interwar years: Vogue (UK), Eve/Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, Good

2 Introduction Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK).5 These commercial magazines made avant-garde culture available for their predominantly middle-class readerships alongside a wealth of radical new freedoms and diversions emerging for early twentieth-century women. Modernist scholars have long destabilized the perceived divide between high art and popular culture by tracing interactions between modernism, the literary marketplace, and mass-cultural forms.6 This book provides the first extended study of the presence and treatment of modernism across a selection of commercial women’s magazines and attends to an array of contributions by canonical and marginalized writers to these ephemeral texts. Though my background is in literary and periodical studies, this project also engages with visual cultures. Jessica Burstein argues forcefully in Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (2012) that ‘there is no outside to culture’: ‘Novels and poems happen alongside and in concert with other forms of cultural expression’.7 Central to my argument and approach in this book is the premise that modernism not only interacted with the mainstream but was shaped by the wider culture of which it was a part. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines uncovers how commercial women’s periodicals debated, disrupted, and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture, and discloses their participation in the construction of modernism’s public profile. Chapter 1 lays the foundations for this study by introducing the four magazines under scrutiny alongside exploring their diverse responses to modernity. This first chapter provides an overview of each title and shows how interwar Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar negotiated the modern with regard to fashion, consumption, and domesticity as well as women’s increasing rights and opportunities as public citizens. Chapter 2 turns to modernism’s journey into and out of fashion across upmarket fashion magazines Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar in the interwar years. It demonstrates how discourses of fashion shaped these magazines’ treatment of contemporary experiments in modernist literature and the visual arts, and interrogates their privileging of novelty, originality, and sophistication. Chapter 3 recovers experimental journalism and fiction by a range of interwar women writers in Good Housekeeping, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar. Reading magazine contributions by Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia Woolf, I argue that modernist experimentalism existed within wider currents of feminist resistance and textual play in domestic and fashion periodicals. Chapter 4 probes the emergence of high modernist celebrities in the women’s press through two case studies. The first tracks the fluctuating reputations of Woolf and Bloomsbury modernism across all four titles in the interwar period; the second focuses on the reception of Gertrude Stein and the Parisian avant-garde in early 1930s Harper’s Bazaar. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines shows repeatedly how these

Introduction  3 highly commercialized, feminized texts trespassed freely on high culture, making modernism more accessible to their readers by debating and printing experimental writing and artwork while insisting on its difficulty and exclusivity. My coda returns to the implications of this study for broader critical narratives of modernism’s relationship to early twentieth- century literature and culture. The rest of this introduction sets out the research contexts for this book, situates its core texts in relation to interwar women’s print culture, and explains its method and approach.

Modernism, Magazines, and Popular Culture The part played by periodicals in the rise and spread of modernist culture is by now well established. Since the late 1990s, the new modernist studies have directed substantial critical attention to the economic transactions, social and professional networks, and cultural conditions that facilitated and shaped the production, dissemination, and reception of modernism, with particular interest among literary critics in the textual histories and early publication contexts of modernist works. The early twenty-first century has seen a flurry of activity by modernist scholars in the archives of magazines and newspapers.8 This research has shown emphatically that periodicals ‘belonged to the institutions that sustained and promoted modernism’, as Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker affirm in their introduction to the first volume of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009).9 ‘Periodicals functioned’, Brooker and Thacker outline, ‘as points of reference, debate, and transmission at the heart of an internally variegated and often internationally connected counter-cultural sphere’.10 Much work in this area has focused on so-called ‘little magazines’ – minority journals of literature, the arts, and new ideas that were determinedly modern in outlook, frequently low in circulation, precariously financed, and often short-lived – through which avant-garde writers and editors printed, negotiated, and marketed modernism. But modernism circulated in the mainstream commercial press too. ‘Modernism happened in the magazines all right’, as Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman assert in Modernism in the Magazines (2010), ‘but it didn’t happen only in the little ones’.11 It is more than three decades since Andreas Huyssen contemplated the longevity of ‘the Great Divide’, his convenient shorthand for ‘the kind of discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture’, and posited that modernism ‘constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination’ by its feminized, mass cultural ‘other’.12 In the intervening years, modernism’s relationship to mass culture has been under sustained review. A wave of revisionist scholarship has focused on uncovering how modernist authors and texts adopted and subverted commercial practices of

4 Introduction the literary marketplace, frequently in the service of self-promotion.13 Mark Morrisson’s analysis of British and American little magazines in The Public Face of Modernism (2001), for example, aims to show how modernist authors and editors ‘adapt[ed] commercial culture to the needs of modernist literature, thus complicating the polarization of modernism and mass culture’.14 Evolving alongside and from this important work, a further strand of research – now prominent within modernist studies – traces modernism’s emergence in, engagement with, and, crucially, mediation by diverse forms of popular culture, including fashion, celebrity, cinema, contemporary music, and mass-market publishing and journalism.15 As part of this project, a number of critics have investigated interactions between modernism and commercial periodicals, ranging from high-circulation newspapers and pulp magazines to medium- circulation ‘smart magazines’ or ‘slicks’.16 Michael Murphy’s early discussion of Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair in Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt’s Marketing Modernisms (1996) explores this US smart magazine’s ‘explicit role […] as promoter and even market planner for the new art’ as it strove ‘to keep its mass upper-middle-class readership culturally up-to-date’ and ‘mediate[d] the vagaries of high-modernist aesthetics’.17 ‘It is a mistake clearly’, Brooker and Thacker stress, to see ‘the distinction between minority “little magazine” and mainstream publications […] as a static binary opposition of distinct, homogenous areas’.18 ‘We need a flexible and dialogic version of this distinction’, they propose, ‘to understand the dynamic of the avant-garde and the relative stability, over time, of a “normalized” modernism, overtaken, side-stepped, or made new again by its inheritors’.19 We need to notice, too, ‘how “symbolic capital” might accrue to a commercial publication that includes the avant-garde as a marker of its own “being modern”’. 20 Vanity Fair is one of two ‘larger magazines’ that Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey identify in Modernism’s Print Cultures (2016) as ‘attracting increasing interest from scholars of Anglophone modernism’. 21 The other is another Condé Nast publication, the British edition of Vogue under the editorship of Dorothy Todd. Between 1922 and 1926, Todd took Vanity Fair as a model for British Vogue as she endeavoured to transform this high-end fashion magazine into a highbrow review, situating haute couture alongside news of avant-garde art, literature, music, and dance. ‘These titles were positioned between elite and mainstream cultures’, Hammill and Hussey note, ‘and mediated modernism for a mass audience’.22 Hammill has explored the nuances of this ‘middle ground’ elsewhere, describing Vanity Fair as ‘a middle space, located between the author-centred production model of the avant-garde magazines and the market-driven arena of the daily papers and mass-circulation weeklies’ that was characterized by ‘middlebrow cultural eclecticism’. 23 Since the 1990s, the rise of middlebrow studies has provided a new term, or rather, an old term reimagined, with which to recognize and

Introduction  5 negotiate such sites of transmission between experimental and mass culture. 24 Central to this field’s project has been the repositioning of the ‘betwixt and between’ status that Virginia Woolf famously disparaged in the middlebrow as a positive identity and cultural position.25 Critics use the term ‘middlebrow’ diversely to describe writers, readers, texts, literary techniques, and markets and there remains much debate, as Melissa Sullivan and Sophie Blanch observe in the introduction to their 2011 special issue of Modernist Cultures, ‘regarding the conceptualisation of the middlebrow as a form of reading practice, a useful tool for analysing audiences, a variable aesthetic mode or, perhaps, any combination of these three possibilities’.26 For some, following Pierre Bourdieu’s identification of ‘middle-brow culture as the product of the system of large-scale production’, the middlebrow remains a fundamentally commercial project ‘characterized by tried and proven techniques […] often linked with […] conservatism’ and ‘condemned to define itself in relation to legitimate culture’. 27 For others, it is a legitimate and potentially subversive culture in its own right. Nicola Humble’s important work on the ‘feminine middlebrow’ novel, for example, considers the middlebrow ‘a hybrid form’ and ‘a feminine literature’ (though not always written by women), that was ‘very much […] of the middle classes’ and ‘a powerful force in establishing and consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender identities’ in the interwar years and beyond. 28 In Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture (2015), Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith define the middlebrow ‘as a mode of circulation, reception, and consumption of cultural products, and also as a space where high and popular culture meet, and where art encounters consumerism’.29 This last notion of the middlebrow is particularly applicable to British Vogue and the other women’s magazines under analysis in this book. To date, critical readings of Todd’s Vogue have largely focused on the magazine’s promotion of the Bloomsbury Group, that loose affiliation of artists, writers, and thinkers including Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and Raymond Mortimer, with whom Todd became acquainted and allied herself during her time in London. Nicola Luckhurst’s Bloomsbury in Vogue (1998) has shown that the magazine provided a ‘valuable promotional space’ for Bloomsbury in the 1920s at the same time as ‘making the highbrow chic’.30 Jane Garrity emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between the two, positing that while Bloomsbury ‘wage[d] a successful self-promotional campaign in Vogue’, the magazine recognized ‘that the Group was a marketable commodity’ and ‘exploited Bloomsbury’s intellectual, upper-class position’.31 Christopher Reed argues that both Bloomsbury and Vogue evince a significant sexual subculture of the 1920s, and traces overlaps between Bloomsbury’s sexual nonconformity, cross-dressing, and camp and Vogue’s ‘gender-blurring modernity’ when edited by Todd with her lover Madge Garland as fashion editor.32 Virginia Woolf’s interactions

6 Introduction with Vogue have attracted particular attention from Luckhurst, Garrity, Reed, and a number of other critics. 33 Moving away from a focus on Bloomsbury modernism, Aurelea Mahood analyses literary criticism by Richard Aldington and Edith Sitwell in Todd’s Vogue and highlights the ‘complex dialectic between high culture and fashion’ in the magazine throughout the 1920s.34 Amanda Carrod has made a case for reading Todd’s Vogue as part of the dialogue of modernist magazines, drawing comparisons between its features and those of T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion and American literary magazine The Dial, while also emphasizing the importance of fashion to the magazine’s conception of modernism.35 Given that ‘much recent scholarship on modern consumer-orientated magazines emphasizes their visual and stylistic diversity, generic openness and ability to hold conflicting views in a productive tension’, Hammill and Hussey contend, ‘[i]t is therefore important to include “smart magazines”, women’s titles and fashion magazines in the conversation about modernist print, even though they are rarely assimilable to conventional definitions of “modernism”, and are in no sense “little”’.36 This book develops from this existing work on the relationship between modernism, magazines, middlebrow, and popular culture and responds to rising scholarly interest in modernism’s presence in mainstream periodicals. It significantly extends critical discussion of interactions between modernism and British women’s magazines, which has chiefly been limited to analysis of Vogue under Todd, by offering sustained analysis of the presence, treatment, and mediation of modernism across four commercial women’s titles in circulation in Britain across the interwar period. The magazines it surveys have been selected because they published modernist writers and/or paid particular attention to modernism. Three of my core texts are fashion magazines. This book contextualizes scholarly discussion of Nast’s British Vogue by analysing this magazine alongside two of its competitors: Eve, later Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a homegrown fashion magazine from the London publishers of The Sphere and The Tatler in print from 1919 to 1929 (for simplicity I use the short title Eve throughout unless necessary to distinguish between the different phases of the magazine’s run), and the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar, launched by William Randolph Hearst’s National Magazine Company in 1929. Each of these high-end fashion periodicals emphasized their modernity by attending to the latest trends in art, literature, theatre, music, dance, and cinema as well as dress. They addressed wealthy, sophisticated, leisured readers or those who aspired to such a lifestyle. My fourth core text, a domestic magazine, provides a counterpoint. The British edition of Good Housekeeping, launched by Hearst’s National Magazine Company in 1922, is one of a range of consumer ‘service’ magazines emerging in Britain in the wake of the First World War.37 Alongside its domestic and consumer advice, interwar Good Housekeeping was more attentive to contemporary social and

Introduction  7 political contexts than developments in the arts, but it also responded sporadically to modernist movements and notably published modernist authors. All four magazines in differing ways correspond to Hammill’s definition of the middlebrow as ‘a productive place from which to reflect on the commerce between high and popular culture, a place of intellectual curiosity and cultural aspiration combined with a healthy skepticism about pretension’.38 Yet, there are distinct differences between them in routine content, visual style, and editorial outlook. As well as investigating how these magazines received, transmitted, and fashioned modernist culture for their predominantly female, middle-class audiences, this book speaks within a growing body of scholarship on early twentieth-century fashion and domestic magazines that stresses the diversity of women’s periodicals, and, as the editors of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939 (2018) have it, which seeks to ‘challenge persistent narratives about British interwar women’s history and about women’s print media’ by ‘rereading popular, commercial publications which have been assumed to be retrograde organs of conservatism and/or consumerism’.39 Three decades of revisionist scholarship have transformed perceptions of modernism’s relationship to popular culture, as Laura Frost observes, giving us ‘a more effervescent [modernism] that writes for Vogue, courts celebrity, and adores Chaplin films’, within which ‘even high modernism can look downright user-friendly’.40 While welcoming this shift in critical narratives, we must notice it threatens to create myths of its own. Modernism’s presence in commercial periodicals such as Vogue and Vanity Fair has become a familiar signifier of the mainstreaming of modernist culture, though the scholars whose research first valuably exposed this presence note that these magazines addressed ‘upper-class’ or ‘minority’ readerships.41 It was, after all, the ‘perceived “restricted” appeal of modernism’, as Mahood contends in relation to British Vogue, that ‘became the very means by which it entered the literary and cultural mainstream’.42 Frost cautions, too, that ‘at the same time that scholars produce a more vernacular, culturally savvy, and accessible field, modernism’s own overt rhetoric about its relationship to pleasure upholds the great divide’.43 In The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents (2013), she argues that literary modernism maintained a binary between highbrow and lowbrow by ‘instruct[ing] its reader in the art of unpleasure’, which ‘is not the opposite of pleasure’ but ‘its modification’.44 According to Frost, the modernist period saw ‘unpleasure and difficult pleasure […] elevated as aesthetic practices that require extraordinary kinds of reading practices and often entail a hostile relationship to the reader’, and that were ‘predicated on a struggle with other—lesser—kinds of pleasure’ associated with mass culture.45 The word ‘pleasure’ has specific resonances for critics of women’s magazines. It has been used by feminist scholars, particularly in the late

8 Introduction 1980s and 1990s, to reclaim and defend women’s enjoyment of fashion and domestic periodicals and other mass cultural forms directed towards them, including genre fiction, television soap opera, and consumerism.46 ‘The pleasures which women’s magazines offer their readers are not simply liberating nor simply repressive’, Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron conclude in Women’s Worlds (1991).47 Ballaster et al. consider an array of pleasures afforded by these popular texts, including: the reassuring pleasure of a familiar format and outlook; the visual pleasures of their design, illustrations, and advertising; the pleasure of distraction and escape through their fiction and features; and the pleasure of consuming, or, more often, imagining consuming, the aspirational products marketed within women’s magazines and the multiple models they suggest for new ways of living. My analysis of British interwar women’s magazines highlights how Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar disrupt the very notion of a struggle between intellectually demanding and easily consumable pleasures by encouraging their readers’ enjoyment of both difficult and easy pleasures and presenting cultural activities perceived as highbrow and lowbrow side by side. At the same time, this book argues, and paradoxically, these magazines valued cultural hierarchies and supported the construction of modernism as a difficult pleasure, whether delighting in or disparaging experimental art and literature as bewildering, challenging, and strange, even as they made modernism more accessible for their readers.

Women’s Magazines in Interwar Britain The interwar period was one of transition for the women’s press in Britain. ‘Between 1920 and 1939’, Cynthia L. White observes, ‘the structure of the industry changed considerably’ due to ‘the post-war redistribution of wealth’ and ‘the reorientation of women’s journalism away from the servant-keeping leisured classes, and towards the middle ranks’.48 The foundations for this reorientation had been laid in the late nineteenth century when cheaper printing processes (due to the removal of paper taxes and technological innovations such as the rotary press and linotype machine) and increasing literacy following the provision of state elementary education combined with rising consumer capitalism to produce an explosion in print media, including a plethora of women’s periodicals directed to different sections of the growing reading public. ‘The most important development of the 1890s in terms of women’s reading was the cheap, that is the penny, domestic weekly’, Margaret Beetham contends, which, by 1910 ‘had established that dominance in the market which it was to retain unbroken for the rest of the twentieth century’.49 Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder cite the founding of the Society of Women Journalists in 1894 as evidence of women’s expanding

Introduction  9 influence across the periodical press as writers and editors as well as readers, the latter ‘aggressively courted’ by mainstream periodicals increasingly reliant on advertising revenue and appealing to women as ‘the period’s primary consumer[s]’.50 Women’s magazines aimed at the gentry and aristocracy steadily declined in the years after the First World War, White observes, while those aimed at the entrepreneurial classes and the workers thrived.51 Launched in the midst of paper shortages and shipping restrictions during the First World War, the British edition of Vogue (Condé Nast, 1916 –, 1s) provided high fashion and society news twice a month for wealthy leisured women and middle-class women aspiring to elite style in the interwar period. Vogue’s international outlook (with fashion pages transplanted from the US edition), high production values, and lavish illustrations, funded by advertisements from manufacturers of luxury goods, made the magazine Britain’s premier fashion periodical. For a decade its closest British rival was Eve (Sphere and Tatler, 1919–29, 1s), a slimmer fashion paper published weekly from March 1920 that also addressed affluent female readers and included society gossip, fiction, and humour. In 1929, Hearst launched a British edition of Harper’s Bazaar (National Magazine Company, 1929–70, 2s), an upmarket fashion monthly to compete with Nast’s Vogue. In another sector of the market, cheap weekly magazines dominated by romance fiction proliferated for single working-class girls and young women (the minimum school leaving age was 14 in 1919), including the mill-girl magazine Peg’s Paper (Pearson, 1919–40, 1½d) and Girls’ Favourite (Amalgamated Press, 1922–27, 2d), directed to office workers.52 During the 1920s, alongside well-established domestic weeklies such as Home Notes (Pearson, 1894–1958, 2d) and Home Chat (Amalgamated Press, 1895–1959, 2d), a new wave of midrange, monthly, consumer-driven women’s magazines emerged offering the middle and lower-middle classes advice on domestic matters, fashion, health, and beauty, with a high proportion of advertising from manufacturers and retailers of products from these fields. White notes that the ‘primary function’ of these magazines, including the UK edition of Good Housekeeping (National Magazine Company, 1922-, 1s), Modern Woman (Newnes, 1925–66, 6d) Woman and Home (Amalgamated Press, 1926-, 6d), and Modern Home (Newnes, 1928– 51, 6d), was ‘to render the woman reader ‘“intimate personal service”, with a secondary emphasis on entertainment’, which was a ‘reversal’ of the ‘order of priorities’ that characterized women’s magazines prior to the First World War.53 Brian Braithwaite and Joan Barrell identify the 1930s as ‘a most significant decade in the development of women’s magazines’ with the launch of new lower-middle-class women’s weeklies Woman’s Own (Newnes and Pearson, 1932–, 2d), Woman’s Illustrated (Amalgamated Press, 1936–61, 2d), and Woman (Odhams, 1937–, 2d), that created a blueprint for mass-market women’s magazines in the

10 Introduction decades that followed.54 Woman, the first British woman’s magazine to be fully produced by colour rotogravure, reached sales of 750,000 by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.55 In addition to these and many more women’s magazines from mainstream publishers, the interwar years saw the continued publication of feminist suffrage papers such as the Women’s Freedom League’s Vote (1909–33, 1d), with a refocused and expanded agenda following the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918, and papers of other women’s organizations, such as the Mothers’ Union Journal (1888–1954, 1d) and the Women’s Cooperative Guild’s Woman’s Outlook (1919–67, 3½d), as well as women’s professional magazines such as the Woman Journalist (Society of Women Journalists, 1923–, 6d) and Woman Teacher (National Union of Women Teachers, 1919–61, 1d).56 Clay, DiCenzo, Green, and Hackney suggest this period ‘exhibited increasing levels of differentiation and stratification within the women’s periodical market in Britain, transforming and multiplying the ways in which women’s gender identities could be constructed, sometimes in conflicting ways’.57 Women’s gender identities were variously constructed not only in women’s magazines but across the popular national daily press in interwar Britain, Adrian Bingham has traced, as a range of social, economic, and political contexts combined to challenge established notions of gender.58 These contexts include the extension of the vote to women, the growth of consumer society, the advent of mass unemployment, and ‘intellectual shifts in the understanding of personal and sexual character, especially the popularization of psychoanalysis and sexology’.59 Women’s rights and roles as wives, workers, and citizens underwent substantial change in this period. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 ruled that women should not be prevented from entering the professions or public office on the grounds of their sex or marriage, though in reality many married women continued to give up work or were compelled to do so. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 finally enabled women to petition for divorce on the basis of their spouse’s adultery, an action previously only available to men. In 1918, Constance Markievicz was the first woman to be elected as a Member of Parliament, though as a member of Sinn Fein she did not sit in the House of Commons; in 1919, Nancy Astor became the first female MP to take her seat in Westminster. Equal enfranchisement of women was achieved in 1928 after the Representation of the People Act 1918 had granted the vote to all men over the age of 21 and women over the age of 30 who owned property or were married to a man of property. Women’s education, the citizenship of the consumer and homemaker, and the peace campaign were also prominent topics for women’s organizations and periodicals in Britain in the interwar period. As multi-authored texts, magazines are predisposed to articulate and generate conflicting views even within a single issue. Beetham describes

Introduction  11 how the ‘magazine has developed in the two centuries of its history as a miscellany, that is a form marked by variety of tone and constituent parts’.60 Scholars of women’s magazines have explored the many ways these multifaceted documents reflect, engage, and instruct their female audiences. This field has its origins in early feminist accounts of the oppressive gender roles constructed and imposed by women’s magazines, exemplified by Betty Friedan’s critique of the ‘happy housewife heroine’ of post-war American women’s magazines in The Feminine Mystique (1963).61 Drawing on insights from Marxist, structuralist, and post-structuralist theory, feminist media historians, sociologists, and cultural critics have subsequently traced the complex workings of ideology and discourse across these commercial texts. Marjorie Ferguson’s seminal Forever Feminine (1983) posited that women’s magazines ‘are about femininity itself – as a state, a condition, a craft, and an art form which comprise a set of practices and beliefs’, in which, editors and publishers assume, the female reader ‘“needs” or “wants” to be instructed’.62 Other critics have considered women’s magazines as dialogic spaces to which readers also give meaning and within which can be found departures from and resistance to repressive domestic ideology.63 Janice Winship’s Inside Women’s Magazines (1987) has sensitively traced the pleasures readers can derive from women’s magazines – from their content, form, and the context in which they are read (e.g. for relaxation) – while also acknowledging that these pleasures are not ‘individual’ and ‘spontaneous’ but have ‘had to be learnt’ and are dependent on ‘being familiar with the cultural codes of what is meant to be pleasurable, and on occupying the appropriate social spaces’.64 ‘The feminine activities of cooking, creating and looking after a home, and making oneself attractive have an uncertain status’, Winship explains, because they are understood by women both as work, though a kind of work that is ‘largely unrecognised by men’ because it is ‘unpaid and done “for love”’, and as tasks that ‘can be pleasurable and creative to do’, with a finished product that ‘may be intended to provide aesthetic and other pleasures for self as well as others’.65 The tensions inherent in this merging ‘of work and leisure, of work and pleasure’, Winship argues, are ‘embodied in women’s magazines’, which, through their text and ‘visual fictions’, their editorial and commercial content, ‘weave stories around what is demarcated as a feminine work (closely bound up with the purchase and use of commodities)’.66 Ellen Gruber Garvey’s The Adman in the Parlour (1996) forcefully demonstrates the centrality of advertising to the meaning of women’s magazines by revealing interactions between magazine fiction, editorial matter, and commercial material in periodicals from the 1880s to 1910s.67 ‘Most researchers today agree that magazines are prescriptive as well as descriptive’, Carolyn Kitch asserts of the magazine form in The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research (2015).68 She helpfully identifies three models in recent scholarship for

12 Introduction understanding magazines ‘as a form of control, as a form of community and as a form of culture’, noting that the latter view ‘problematizes the dichotomy between the top-down vs. bottom-up models’ by interpreting magazines ‘as a cultural form in their own right’ and ‘an expression of the ideals of the surrounding culture’.69 In The Female Complaint (2008), Lauren Berlant identifies ‘women’s culture’ as ‘one of many flourishing intimate publics’.70 ‘An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers’, she poses, ‘claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particular core interests and desires’.71 Each of the magazines analysed in this study circulated within the wider public of ‘women’s culture’ and also sought to create a distinct public of loyal readers who ‘feel as though it expresses what is common among them’.72 While it is a possible to build a profile of the anticipated readers of these magazines based on their price, content, and the intimate publics they address, it is difficult to ascertain much factual information about their readers. Interwar Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar had no regular letters page for correspondence from readers to the editor, and Good Housekeeping had only a health questionnaire through which readers submitted letters seeking medical advice on minor ailments and matters of cosmetic concern while giving away little information about personal circumstances. I have had no access to distribution lists as part of this research and only limited circulation figures are available for these magazines. However, Hackney’s work on interwar service magazines, which has included collecting oral histories from women who were reading magazines in the 1930s, indicates the fine gradations in class and education that distinguished readers of different sections of the commercial women’s press, and ‘the ambiguities surrounding what it meant to be middle class in the period’.73 The majority of Hackney’s respondents ‘read at least one, and often more, “women’s interest” or domestic magazines’; the new weeklies of the 1930s, for example, which are of central interest to Hackney, were read by both working-class and middle-class women, but were more popular among those ‘remaining longer in education, irrespective of class’.74 Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar predominantly targeted middle-class women, with the three fashion magazines addressed to a wealthier and more leisured audience than Good Housekeeping though it is likely that this framing reflected the aspirations rather than the reality of many readers. The readers of all four magazines were expected to be female, to be middle class or higher, to be educated, and to be white, though of course there is no reason to suppose that all readers fit this profile. One of Hackney’s interviewees, Mabel Cunningham, ‘whose engineer father was unemployed in the 1930s’ and ‘notably classified herself as working-class’ (though her father’s technical profession might otherwise position her as a member of the ‘new middle classes’), had nevertheless attended

Introduction  13 grammar school and included Good Housekeeping in her ‘extensive list’ of favourite titles.75 The identities constructed in these magazines were often specifically English, but, as Beetham observes, ‘weekly or monthly magazines continued to be of interest even when past their date of publication, which made them attractive to purchasers overseas’.76 In the late nineteenth-century and through into the interwar period, women’s magazines produced in London ‘were distributed not just around the British Isles but to Britain’s colonies’.77 Likewise, while we can make assumptions about the lives and interests of these magazines’ diverse audiences based on their content, there is no reason to assume that all readers will have identified with or been equally interested by all features. One reader might study Eve’s book column or golf page with care, while another routinely flipped past these preferring society news. One reader might purchase Harper’s Bazaar primarily for its fashion pages, while another gave equal or more attention to its articles and fiction. The results of a Reading Questionnaire published in Good Housekeeping in March 1929, which are transcribed in full in this book’s appendix, provide some solid if limited evidence about the literary tastes of this magazine’s readers. The questionnaire was printed in the Christmas Number in 1928 and aimed to garner an ‘accurate idea of the kind of literature read by intelligent women of the educated class’.78 The editors neglect to share how many responses were obtained in total, though they assure readers that ‘answers to this Questionnaire are still being received in considerable quantities’, and specify that 77% of answers were drawn from England – of which 13% were from London – 9% from Scotland, 7% from Ireland, 5% from Wales, and 2% from ‘foreign readers’, presumably largely subscribers in British colonies.79 These results indicate Good Housekeeping’s predominantly English core audience and its largely conservative reading tastes, with Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail top of the list of daily newspapers taken regularly at 37.01% (The Times came ‘a very good second’ at 20.13%).80 Novelists enjoyed by the magazine’s readers include Charles Dickens (21.4%), Jane Austen (16.9%), and Walter Scott (6.5%) of the ‘Classics’, and John Galsworthy (40.26%), Hugh Walpole (18.1%), and Warwick Deeping (16.9%) among the ‘Moderns’, with H. G. Wells (9.7%), Rose Macaulay (9%), Rudyard Kipling (7.7%), and P. G. Wodehouse (2.6%) featuring further down the list.81 No modernist writer appears, but the editor notes that over 200 authors received a single vote. On the evidence of these results the reading habits of Good Housekeeping’s audience at this time were decidedly eclectic. John o’ London’s Weekly was the most popular Weekly Review taken by 18.8% of Good Housekeeping’s readers, followed by the Spectator (11.6%), Britannia (9.74%), Times Literary Supplement (9%), T.P.’s Weekly (7.7%), New Statesman (7.1%), Radio Times (6.5%), Nursery World (3.2%), Times Educational Supplement

14 Introduction (2.6%), Time and Tide (1.95%), and Woman’s Leader (1.95%) among others.82 Magazines read included Punch (31.1%), the Woman’s Journal (20.8%), and Good Housekeeping’s sister publication Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine (20.13%).83 Only 7.7% of those readers who responded to Good Housekeeping’s reading questionnaire in 1928–29 also subscribed to Vogue; less than 1% were readers of Eve.84 These statistics remind us that though the readerships of my four primary sources were similar and sometimes overlapping, they were also distinct.

Approaching the Archive ‘Magazines are rich texts, but they are also hugely diverse and intricately complex’, as Laurel Forster states in Magazine Movements (2015): ‘Their depth in years, volumes, issues […], their breadth across a vast array of subjects and their interconnectedness through publishing house and associated industries such as advertising, present rather daunting objects of study’.85 Penny Tinkler cautions against the temptation ‘to isolate a title from the field of periodicals within which it has been shaped and encountered or to focus on parts of magazines’, the latter particularly likely ‘where historians dip into magazines for examples to bolster or illustrate an argument’.86 In oft-cited quotations from their article ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’ (2006), Sean Latham and Robert Scholes identify the tendency of scholars from a range of disciplines, including literary studies, ‘to mine [periodical] sources for a narrow range of materials relating to their fields’, and pose that ‘we have often been too quick to see magazines merely as containers as discrete bits of information rather than autonomous objects of study’.87 Even when magazines are the central object of research, Tinkler owns, ‘it is easy to lose sight […] of their complexity and of how visual, textual and material features work together’.88 ‘Fragmentation also arises from practical constraints’, she observes, as scholars ‘are lucky if they have their own copies of magazines’ and more often ‘rely on a combination of notes and photocopies or scans made from archival volumes of magazines’.89 While the digitization of periodicals that has been undertaken in recent decades increases our access to magazines, she argues it also ‘contributes to fragmentation in two main ways’: (1) by ‘encourag[ing] a decontextualised selection of magazine extracts’; and (2) by ‘transform[ing] a three-dimensional object—a magazine—into a two-dimensional image, thereby creating a disjuncture between what we are researching and the version of it that we can work with’.90 As Manushag N. Powell has noted, ‘the digital aspects of research can be a double-edged sword, since electronic access actually encourages readers to navigate with keywords instead of defaulting to reading in context’, thereby returning us to a model of mining periodicals only for selected content against which Latham and Scholes have warned.91 ‘Digitization has proven to be both a gift and a burden’,

Introduction  15 Maria DiCenzo affirms in a 2015 article that asserts this ‘conflicted response is now a commonplace’.92 Critics respond to these various challenges in numerous ways depending on the size and scope of their magazine/s archive, whether or not it is digitized, and the research aims of the project. To complete his wide-ranging ‘mapping exercise’ of The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960 (1997), for example, David Reed calculated the percentage of pages devoted to different kinds of content (e.g. fiction, arts, modern life, women’s pages) across at least six months’ of issues at ten-year intervals for more than thirty magazines over this 80-year period.93 Reed asserts that ‘saying a great deal about very little, as in the overwhelming majority of academic studies, may not be appropriate in this context’, and seeks instead to ‘establish a clear overview’ of each title without ‘generating superfluous information which would camouflage the general picture’.94 In contrast, setting out an adaptable method for study of an individual magazine in Modernism in the Magazines, Scholes and Wulfman emphasize the importance of close reading and of the material object: reading any magazine from the past must start by taking up a single issue of that magazine and reading it. This “taking up” ideally means holding the original in one’s hands and turning the pages. The next best thing is to use a digital edition that enables one to see the entire magazine, with all its advertising, from cover to cover […]. The best way to begin reading a magazine […] is simply to read it—to read every page.95 They suggest a list of information to be garnered alongside this close reading, from the magazine’s editor, regular contributors, contents, and format to ‘a sense of the readership the magazine is trying to reach’, as well as ‘“external” details’ such as circulation data that might be more difficult to trace.96 Adapting the terminology of Jerome McGann, Brooker and Thacker use the term ‘periodical codes’ to describe the wide range of bibliographic features to which scholars of periodicals should attend, ‘including page layout, typefaces, price, […] periodicity of publication (weekly, monthly, quarterly, irregular), use of illustrations […], use and placement of advertisements, quality of paper and binding, networks of distribution and sales’.97 In Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture, Hammill and Smith model four different levels of periodical reading, moving from ‘detailed dissection of individual pages and single issues up towards broader surveys of an annual volume and of a full run’, in order to show ‘the different types of insight which each level of analysis makes possible’ and ‘the elisions and absences which are inevitable in each type of reading’.98 ‘A close reading of a page or issue tells us important things about the interaction of adjacent items, but

16 Introduction nothing about the way that periodicals situate themselves in time’, they explain, while a ‘more “distant” method, surveying a year or several decades’ worth of issues, reveals larger patterns but blurs the detail and relies on generalisations’.99 Tensions remain at the heart of periodical research between close and distance reading, and between the conviction that to study a magazine we must read it in its entirety and the recognition that, as Jeffrey Drouin puts it, ‘[m]agazines are not novels or narratives designed to be read from cover to cover, but rather organized containers of varied material with a table of contents to help the reader jump around’.100 Drawing on ideas from information theory and software design, Latham argues that a magazine has ‘a much greater degree of “affordance”’ than a codex book, that is, a greater range of ‘action possibilities’ through which it can be read (e.g. serial reading from beginning to end, non-linear skimming, use of a table of contents to select items of interest).101 This greater degree of affordance, he contends, produces the conditions for ‘emergence’, a term he takes from systems theory to describe the creation of meanings that arise from the multiple ways in which the individual units of a periodical text interact.102 Latham encourages us to see magazines as ‘complex systems capable of producing meaning through the unplanned and even unexpected interaction of their components’.103 ‘In the material sense’, Drouin outlines, ‘the editorial unity of a periodical combines a multivocal authorship with the more-or-less coherent vision of its editors’, which ‘allows for interpreting a certain amount of editorial intent and randomness in the relationship among pieces within an issue or across multiple numbers’.104 Meaning in periodicals depends on context. Take, for example, an advertisement from the Anglo-American oil company, Pratts (later Esso), published in the January 1930 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and the May 1930 issue of Good Housekeeping. The advertisement depicts an attractive female driver seated behind the wheel as she waits for her fuel tank to be filled with the caption ‘The essence of refinement’. In the course of my teaching, I have enjoyed productive conversations with students reading this image on the glossy back cover of the January 1930 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, priced extravagantly at two shillings, in which we also find high fashion news, the regular photo-page ‘The Camera Follows Society’, and an experimental short story by Virginia Woolf. The advertisement’s reference to ‘refinement’ notably resonates here with haute couture, society snapshots, and modernist writing to frame the motorcar and the fuel required to run it, as well as designer fashions, modernist literature, and, indeed, this high-class fashion monthly, as elite luxury products directed to a cultured feminine audience. But, when we meet this same advertisement inside the May 1930 issue of Good Housekeeping, a domestic monthly sold at half the price, it means a little differently. We might still remark on the clever wordplay to market ‘refined’ fuel to women, who

Introduction  17 were commonly responsible for household expenditure in this period, but the word ‘refinement’ does not carry the same connotations of cultural sophistication in a magazine in which high fashion and the aristocracy are not prominent and modernist writing is absent. The colour scheme of the advertisement and the formatting of its lower text differ slightly between Harper’s Bazaar and Good Housekeeping (the first example uses a pale green as base colour and the second a blue-grey), but the variation in meaning stems not from the advertisements themselves but from their position in the wider periodical systems in which they are printed. This brief example reflects what scholars of periodicals have long argued: that meaning is derived from interactions between periodical content, that visual and textual elements influence interpretation, and that readers’ expectations of a periodical, informed by material features such as a price and paper quality as well as routine content, play a significant role in shaping how that magazine’s content is read. The research for this book has taken place among physical copies of magazines archived in libraries, usually bound in volumes, and subsequently with digital scans and photographs of their pages.105 I have read as widely as possible in interwar British Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar, but, due to practical constraints, this research has necessarily been selective. In an attempt to balance advantages of close and distance reading, I have followed a process of sampling combining close scrutiny of three months’ worth of issues of each magazine from every year of publication between 1916 and 1939 with lighter scanning of all issues published every third year during this period. This sampling makes it possible to track changes in the magazines over time and ensures a minimum level of coverage for each magazine, though it should be noted their differing publication frequencies mean this process involves reading significantly more issues per year for Eve, published weekly, and Vogue, published fortnightly, than for Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar, published monthly. The issues subject to close analysis have been chosen at random, sometimes reading issues sequentially for three months of publication, sometimes reading every third or fourth issue across a single year. Following the insights of periodical studies, I have endeavoured to avoid cherry-picking content out of context and to attend to commercial, editorial, and feature material with care. However, where modernist content has been identified, it has inevitably drawn my focus. After sampling, I have paid additional attention to those years in which modernism was most visible in each magazine. In particular, my reading of Vogue, the longest-running title, has been more extensive in the 1920s than the 1930s. It is not the goal of this book to be exhaustive. My research could not hope to explore every avenue of interest within these complex cultural artefacts, and nor does it aim to catalogue every reference to modernism in these magazines across the interwar era.

18 Introduction Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines joins a growing body of research on women’s periodicals of interwar Britain. Each of the book’s four chapters approaches the primary sources at its heart from a different angle. Chapter 1 practises the activities of close and distance reading with detailed analysis of material drawn from single issues of Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar alongside broader accounts of each periodical’s publication history, editorship, and typical content in the interwar period and their interrogations of modernity. This discussion provides important context for my examination of the magazines’ treatment of modernism in the chapters that follow. Chapters 2 and 4 consider how women’s magazines mediated modernism through the discourses of fashion and celebrity respectively. Chapter 3 reads experimental women’s magazine contributions, including essays and short fiction, from interwar women writers in the context of the magazines’ routine content. Together these chapters present an extended analysis of my core texts, which considers how these periodicals navigated modernity and moulded modernism for their female readers’ consumption. Though my discussion of Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar is focused through the lens of modernist studies, it is hoped this book will also be of value to readers outside this field with an interest in the literary and cultural history of these largely neglected periodicals.

Notes 1 R. H. Mottram, ‘Seeing through Piccadilly’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 26 December 1928, p. 745. 2 Ibid. 3 Clare Sheridan, ‘No Precedence, No Manners—and No Boredom’, Harper’s Bazaar, May 1933, p. 26. 4 Ibid., pp. 27, 80. The annual schools’ cricket match played in July between Eton and Harrow at London’s Lord’s cricket ground had been a major event in the London social calendar since the late nineteenth century; see Martin Polley, ‘Sports Development in the Nineteenth-Century Public Schools’, in Routledge Handbook of Sports Development, ed. by Barry Houlihan and Mick Green (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 9–19 (p. 14). 5 Hereafter, all references to Vogue, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar are to the British editions unless otherwise stated. When the American editions are discussed, this will be clearly identified. In the text of this book, I refer to Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial with the short title Eve for simplicity unless necessary to distinguish between different phases of the magazine’s run. 6 The history of this revisionist scholarship will be traced out in more detail below, but some key early works include: Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, ed., Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbour: University

Introduction  19

7 8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16

of Michigan Press, 1996); and Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), p. 11. For a sample of this work, see: Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, ed., Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier, ed., Transatlantic Print Culture: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker with Sascha Bru and Christian Weikop, ed., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–13); Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Paul Jackson, Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine (London: Continuum, 2012); Chris Mourant, Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–26 (p. 2). Ibid., p. 2. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 41. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. vii–viii. Key texts in this vein include Wicke, Advertising Fictions (1988); Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (1993); Dettmar and Watt, Marketing Modernisms (1996); Rainey, Institutions (1999), and Morrisson, Public Face of Modernism (2001). Morrisson, p. 6. For a sample of this work, see: Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Jonathan Goldman, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Burstein, Cold Modernism (2012); Lise Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014); Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For examples of this work, see Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (2006); Catherine Keyser, Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); David M. Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015); Donal Harris, On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

20 Introduction

Introduction  21

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22 Introduction

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1

Mediating Modernity

In her influential The Gender of Modernity (1995), Rita Felski observed that ‘the idea of the modern saturates the discourses, images, and narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ and provocatively asked: ‘How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women?’1 Commercial women’s magazines of this period were profoundly shaped ‘by the attempt to situate individual lives and experiences in relation to broader historical patterns and overarching narratives of innovation and decline’. 2 The four interwar women’s magazines surveyed in this study addressed their readers as informed and discerning spectators of and participants in modernity. ‘The novelty of female entry into what, until the first decades of the twentieth century, had been predominately a masculine public realm did not pass unnoticed in the commercial press’, as Fiona Hackney has identified, and ‘women’s achievements in sports, the arts, and government, as well as the latest innovations in female dress, were regularly splashed across the media, including newspapers and magazines’. 3 Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar were all shaped by the new rights and opportunities opening up for women in interwar Britain and we can find examples of articles and images in each that position women’s activities in the public sphere (as voters, graduates, sportswomen, writers, politicians, etc.) as representative of modernity. Equally significant and far more pervasive, their routine consumer, domestic, and fashion pages were also inscribed with narratives of transformation and progress. These interwar magazines convey an array of contrary attitudes to the contemporary moment, including reverence of and contempt for tradition as well as fear and delight at the new. ‘To view modernity from the standpoint of consumption rather than production’, Felski contends, puts ‘femininity at the heart of the modern’.4 From the late nineteenth century, ‘the consumer was frequently represented as a woman’ and ‘her status as consumer gave her an intimate familiarity with the rapidly changing fashions and lifestyles that constituted an important part of the felt experience of being modern’. 5

Mediating Modernity  25 Mass-market women’s magazines, just like urban department stores, emphasized women’s purchasing power as the nation’s primary shoppers and created a space for them to explore new identities through their real, or imagined, consumption.6 Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan have argued that ‘fashion offers an important means to expand our understanding of the relationship between femininity and modernity by allowing us to draw connections between women as symbols or objects and women as agents of the modern’ and ‘to see how women navigated their position as modern subjects’.7 Not only did consumption and fashion draw women into public commercial spaces, but, as Felski notes, ‘modern industry and commerce encroached ever more insistently on the sanctity of the private and domestic realm through the commodification of the household’.8 Judy Giles explores how women ‘were positioned at the forefront’ of the shift towards a consumer-orientated economy in the early twentieth century as ‘the “modern” home, run by a “professional” housewife’, became ‘the place where the practices of getting and spending found their most potent expression’.9 ‘The figure of the housewife was equally emblematic of modern life in the period as the female politician, the film star, or the sportswoman’, Hackney claims, and ‘was certainly more ubiquitous’.10 In her pivotal study of conservative modernity, Alison Light suggests that the interwar years ‘mark[ed] for many women their entry into modernity’ through ‘new kinds of social and personal opportunity’ from ‘tennis clubs’ and ‘cinema-going’ to ‘new patterns of domestic life’ and ‘the disposable sanitary napkin’.11 ‘[E]ven if a new commercial culture of “home-making” was conservative in assuming this to be a female sphere’, Light poses, ‘it nevertheless put woman and the home, and a whole panoply of connected issues, at the centre of national life’.12 Women were addressed as modern subjects across interwar British Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar through their consumption, their dress, and their private and public roles as homemakers, workers, and citizens. This chapter explores some of these contexts alongside introducing the four magazines that are the subject of study in this book. It provides an account of the publication history, editorship, format, and typical content of Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar during 1918–39 and close analysis of a single issue of each magazine. This method is informed by the second chapter of Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture (2015), in which Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith practise four different levels of periodical analysis to compare the different kinds of insights each level brings. Their multi-level approach ‘mov[es] from a focused reading of the elements which make up a single page or issue towards broader generalisations about shifts over time’ that result from reading an annual volume or a magazine across several decades.13 This chapter practises two of these levels of reading in order to supply both a broad summary of the evolution of these magazines

26  Mediating Modernity over the course of my period of study (chiefly 1918–39, though British Vogue is considered from its 1916 launch here) and focused reading of their visual and textual elements and some of the interactions between editorial, feature, and commercial matter within an individual issue. The issues chosen for analysis have been selected at random from across the interwar period. They are typical, as much as they can be, of each magazine at the time of publication. Notably, they have not been selected for their attention to modernism. While modernism will be the lens through which my reading of these magazines is focused in the chapters that follow, this opening chapter attends instead to their routine content, material features, and their diverse approaches to defining and negotiating the modern. In particular, it gestures towards some of the multiple ways in which interwar Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar mediate modernity in relation to women’s experience. I aim to provide an overview of each title that will be helpful to anyone seeking an introduction to these magazines in the interwar years and which lays the broad foundations for my interrogation of their treatment of modernism in the chapters to come.

Vogue Vogue began life in December 1892 as a weekly magazine of fashion and society news ‘for a small circle of socially elite New Yorkers’ founded by Arthur Baldwin Turnure, a Princeton graduate and socialite.14 It was purchased in 1909 by Condé Nast, a young American previously employed as advertising manager for Collier’s magazine, who saw in Vogue a chance to test his theory, developed while he was an advertising man, that there was a place for a medium which would bring together without waste circulation the persons who could afford luxury goods and the persons who wished to sell them.15 Edna Woolman Chase, general editor of Vogue from 1914 to 1952, later recalled that ‘[Nast] didn’t want a big circulation; he wanted a good one’.16 He converted Vogue to a semi-monthly publication, introduced colour covers from 1910, and employed modern artists and photographers to create a visually arresting high-class fashion and society journal that could generate a large income from the sale of advertising space. Its early issues established many of the serial features that would remain central to Vogue in the interwar period such as ‘Seen in the Shops’, ‘Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes’, and the theatre column ‘Playhouse Gossip’, which became ‘Seen on the Stage’.17 British Vogue was launched in 1916, French Vogue appeared in 1920, and an attempt to establish a German Vogue was made in the late 1920s, though this last was unsuccessful.18 The British and French editions were edited autonomously from London

Mediating Modernity  27 and Paris respectively, with Chase as Editor-in-Chief of the three Vogues from New York. British Vogue emerged during the First World War when wartime restrictions on non-essential transatlantic shipping impeded sales of American Vogue in England, which had reached more than 12,000 copies by 1916.19 From July 1916, copies of Vogue sold in the UK differed in content from the American edition with some features produced specifically for a British audience, such as a series of caricatures stereotyping soldiers from different countries of the British Empire in the Late July 1916 issue. 20 The first fully British edition, complete with UK advertising, was published in September 1916. The first publisher and managing editor of British Vogue was William Wood, who had begun work for Nast in 1912 distributing copies of American Vogue in London. Caroline Seebohm documents that Dorothy Todd was the first editor, but was rapidly removed to Nast’s New York office and succeeded by Elspeth Champcommunal, who came from the London office of the fashion house Maison Worth. 21 ‘In the beginning we shipped over mostly fashion material’, Chase recorded, ‘the idea being that gradually we would insert local features—society, shops, entertainment—which would naturally by of greater interest to British readers’.22 Much of early British Vogue’s content was transferred from American Vogue, including fashion illustrations, celebrity snapshots, reviews of New York productions, witty articles, and some society news. British Vogue shared cover art with American Vogue throughout 1916–39 and its colour cover designs were ‘modern and modernist’, as Nicola Luckhurst has observed, with the work of Vogue’s artists, notably Georges Lepape, Eduardo Benito, and Helen Dryden, ‘characterised by bold figures, sculptural simplicity, and stylized modernist forms’ that ‘allude to artists such as Modigliani, Brancusi and Picasso’.23 Initially sold at a shilling, the magazine’s price was raised to one shilling and six-pence in Late June 1918 due to paper shortages and returned to a shilling in 1923. Issues varied in size during 1916–39, fluctuating between 60 and 180 pages depending largely on the volume of advertising, with most issues around 70–90 pages in the interwar period. Early numbers opened with an editorial notice announcing the next issue and a table of contents; the contents list was dropped in the late 1920s and replaced by the editorial ‘Vogue’s Eye View of the Mode’. Content was divided between Fashion, Society, Stage, Arts and Decoration, and Miscellaneous. Crucially, Vogue’s text was usually unsigned, following a policy ‘of anonymity except in especially commissioned articles’ that had been instigated by Turnure to give the magazine a unified authoritative voice. 24 Fashion was the magazine’s biggest section and included attractive fashion plates, traditionally ‘a single, full-length figure or small grouping of full-length figures positioned in the framework of a rectangular border’25 (see Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2); reports on the latest styles

28  Mediating Modernity from Paris and London accompanied by illustrations or photographs; sketches of new models from the Vogue Pattern Service; and ‘Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes’. Society pages included full-page profiles of aristocratic women comprising a large photographic studio portrait and celebratory caption (these were a staple in Vogue throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s); snapshots of the rich and famous at sporting, cultural, or social events; and gossipy reports of society news, such as ‘How One Lives From Day to Day’, a routine feature from early 1927. The magazine’s theatre column, ‘Seen on the Stage’, was supplemented by photographs of actors, dancers, and singers from recent productions. Early British Vogue printed a regular arts column reviewing current exhibitions and a monthly book column, ‘Turning over New Leaves’, later ‘New Books for the Morning-Room Table’, and then ‘Books in Vogue’. The magazine also printed an editorial in the form of a short essay, beauty advice, features on decor and the interiors of aristocratic or celebrity homes, and ‘For the Hostess’, a regular column including suggested menus. Domestic content was limited: Vogue’s readers were addressed as mistress of the house rather than as active housekeepers. Most issues contained one or two special articles such as a seasonal feature on Christmas gift-buying or summer travel, an occasional signed essay, or a comic sketch representing an aspect of contemporary life, such as modern modes of courtship. This content was sandwiched between advertisements for clothes, beauty products, health remedies, baby carriages, department stores, and luxury goods from jewellery to motorcars, which filled the magazine’s opening pages before the contents and then were integrated towards the back of each issue. Together this commercial and editorial matter assumed a readership of affluent, middle- and upper-class women, likely married, perhaps with a young family, but also unmarried women and women whose child-rearing years were behind them. Visually, Vogue was a striking modern product. It was printed on a large, glossy paper, with issues 24.5 cm × 32.5 cm in size containing elegant fashion drawings, large photographs of society women and fashion models, humorous cartoons, and smartly arranged layouts balancing neat columns of text with multiple images. The glamorous fullpage advertisements from fashion designers and retailers that dominated the magazine’s front pages were also part of the pleasure of consuming Vogue, though these initial commercial pages were marked with roman rather than Arabic numerals to distinguish them from the main content. Nevertheless, the style of photography, illustration, and fonts used by advertisers in Vogue often mirrored that favoured inside the magazine creating the impression of harmony and flow between commercial and editorial pages. The magazine’s headings followed a house style in font and arrangement, which gave it a polished, uniform appearance and helped cultivate the Vogue brand. In its early years, British Vogue’s

Mediating Modernity  29 layout and design mixed traditional elements, such as bordered images and serif fonts, with more modern elements, including stylized fashion drawings and the whimsical cartoons of FISH (Anne Harriet Fish). The magazine’s look was further updated in the late 1920s with increased use of sans serif fonts for headings from 1927 and a less cluttered style of layout from 1929 leaving more white space around images and text. Most illustrations were in black and white, with limited use of colour for fashion illustrations or advertisements in some issues from the mid1920s and more routinely in the 1930s. Fashion photography became more prevalent from the early 1930s when Nast invested heavily in this medium, almost doubling his photography budget. 26 This investment significantly modernized the look of Vogue for the new decade with a move away from static studio fashion portraits to images of models outside on location. Colour photography began to appear in the magazine in the mid-1930s. Under the editorship of Champcommunal, who lacked publishing experience, the circulation of British Vogue dropped to ‘well under 9,000’ in the early 1920s and Todd returned to London in 1922 to take the helm. 27 She soon set about transforming the UK edition in ways that Nast and Chase did not approve, turning it into a literary and artistic review that emulated American Vogue’s sister publication, Vanity Fair. 28 Todd introduced signed columns and special articles by renowned writers, artists, and critics. She expanded ‘Turning over New Leaves’, previously relegated to the magazine’s back pages, into a prominent signed feature renamed ‘New Books for the Morning-Room Table’. She hired artists to produce the magazine’s art column who wrote primarily on modernist painting and sculpture. From 1924, she introduced a Vogue ‘Hall of Fame’ elevating contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers to celebrities alongside singers, dancers, and stars of the stage. Chase later conceded that Todd ‘had a gift, amounting to genius, for spotting winners’, as she was ‘the first to show Cocteau’s painting in England and the first to publish Gertrude Stein’s verse and photographs of Le Corbusier’s architecture’. 29 Many of the new contributors to Vogue and the new writers and artists promoted in the magazine (these two groups were overlapping) were associated with the avantgarde Bloomsbury set, with whom Todd mixed socially. The Sitwells and Aldous Huxley also became frequent contributors. ‘Fashion never disappeared as such’, as Luckhurst explains, but Todd visibly prioritized arts and culture rather than fashion and society news through a ‘shifting of the contents order […] equivalent to a seismic upheaval in the deep structure of women’s magazines’. 30 Perhaps most significant of all, Christopher Reed argues, as part of British Vogue’s ‘“modern” openness to new ideas’, Todd and her partner Madge Garland, the magazine’s fashion editor, shifted the magazine’s outlook towards youthful irreverence and sexual nonconformity in place of chic respectability

30  Mediating Modernity and propriety. 31 Reed’s work on mid-1920s Vogue has insightfully revealed its ‘transgressive pleasures—of wit, mass culture, self-conscious performativity’ and demonstrated that under Todd and Garland the magazine was ‘remarkably queer’. 32 Unfortunately, rather than increasing sales as Nast had hoped, Todd’s editorship led British Vogue to lose money. In 1924, the magazine was losing £25,000 a year and Nast hired Harry Yoxall as business manager, leaving Todd as editor.33 ‘By 1926’, Seebohm records, ‘everybody realized that Dorothy Todd had to go’ and ‘Nast cabled Yoxall to fire her, which he reluctantly did’.34 Chase was dispatched to London to take charge and bring British Vogue ‘more closely into line with the American Vogue formula’.35 She redirected the magazine towards fashion and, in an attempt to increase sales, switched from semi-monthly to fortnightly publication in 1927, enabling Vogue to reliably appear on newsstands on Wednesdays, the same day as rival weekly British fashion magazines such as Eve. Alison Settle, an experienced British fashion journalist, was installed as editor of British Vogue from 1927 and remained in post until 1935. While restoring the pre-eminence of fashion and society content in the magazine, Settle did not wholly turn away from the arts or from modernism in her editorship. Elizabeth Darling asserts that Settle ‘may have been a less controversial figure’ than Todd, ‘but she was a quiet modern who, in the 1930s, served on the government’s modernist-inclined design advisory body, the Council for Art and Industry’.36 Settle’s Vogue continued to print articles on modernist décor and design, and, occasionally, modernist art as well as signed essays by high cultural celebrities, such as Huxley, Paul Morand, and Cecil Beaton, who also worked as a photographer for the magazine. Until mid-1929, Vogue’s book column remained a signed feature with contributions from well-known writers including D. H. Lawrence, Naomi Mitchison, Edith Sitwell, G. B. Stern, and Humbert Wolfe. In the early 1930s, ‘Books in Vogue’ returned to a half-page unsigned review column in the magazine’s back pages and art reviews became more sporadic as the decade progressed. In the context of the Great Depression, Settle expanded fashion content aimed towards middle-class women with less disposable income, including knitting patterns and the regular column ‘Shop-hound’. Nevertheless, the magazine continued to cultivate expensive tastes and high social aspirations with articles and advertising promoting designer fashions and international travel by air or ocean liner. Settle was succeeded by Elizabeth Penrose, a young American sent from Vogue’s New York office to take over editorship of the British edition after Settle’s departure in 1935. Penrose held this post until 1939 and was initially supervised closely by Chase.37 She made fashion and service features central, and continued to increase features such as ‘Knit Your Own’ aimed at widening the magazine’s middle-class readership. By 1938, British Vogue’s circulation is estimated to have been between 40,000 and 45,000.38

Mediating Modernity  31

Vogue: Early February 1922 The Early February 1922 issue of Vogue was priced at one shilling and six pence (Vogue’s usual cover price at this time) and contained 62 blackand-white pages. Its modern colour cover design was drawn by Georges Lepape and depicts a stylized female figure in billowing lemon-yellow gown kneeling before a window with a young child at her side. This image of a fashionable young mother looking out from the comfort of her home on the grey weather beyond suggests affluence and domesticity as well as the winter season. The only other colour to be found in this issue is an advertisement for gas-fuelled hot water from the British Commercial Gas Association on the back cover, a modern amenity promising the luxury of hot baths on demand at any time of day for those able to afford it. Inside the magazine, the characteristic hyperbole of fashion journalism positions Vogue itself at the forefront of modernity. For the ‘woman on the threshold of the mode’, the opening editorial notice announces, the next issue’s forecast of Paris Spring fashions will be ‘as essential as the World Almanac’ and ‘as epoch-making as the Einstein theory’.39 Modernity and innovation are evoked in multiple ways across this Vogue issue, which is marked by tensions between past and present and between tradition and modernization. Analysis of this issue illustrates the push and pull between nostalgia and modernity that was typical of Vogue in the interwar period, and particularly in the 1920s. The editor of this Spring Fabrics Number is not identified but was presumably Elspeth Champcommunal. The exact date of Dorothy Todd’s return to the British edition in 1922 is not recorded in histories of Vogue, but the content of this Early February 1922 issue displays none of the signs of Todd’s editorship that became evident later that year. Advertisements for clothes, hats, perfume, soap, hair treatments, cigarettes, and travelling rugs, among other products aimed at female readers, fill the first 8 pages and 6½ pages towards the back of the magazine, plus the two inside covers and back cover – that is, 26.5% of the available space. Fashion is by far the largest content area and fills 43% of the internal pages including 28 illustrated pages on contemporary dress, fabrics, and accessories, and 8 pages of dress designs from the ‘Vogue Pattern Service’. The majority of these pages correspond with American Vogue’s 1 February 1922 issue; fashion illustrations and layouts are transplanted straight from the American edition with alternative copy to accompany them. Commercial and editorial content devoted to dress stresses contemporaneity and originality. Advertisements for ‘New Spring Gowns’ or ‘delightful original Models’ resonate with the magazine’s editorial pages anticipating new trends, such as a column on ‘rumours of the coming mode’.40 Vogue’s fashion content is largely forward facing: ‘In the gowns which the Parisienne is wearing now’, one page asserts, ‘the discerning eye may catch hints of those which will be worn in the coming

32  Mediating Modernity Spring’.41 ‘The Surface View of the Mode’, a three-page review of new fabrics from the French textile firm House of Rodier, celebrates the ‘fresh surprise’ and ‘astonishing variety from season to season’ in this firm’s collections.42 The article views innovations in textile manufacture as a reflection of wider technological modernity. ‘A machine can do anything in this age’, announces the caption below an illustration of a streamlined female model in a machine-embroidered and pleated suit.43 ‘The machine again triumphs’, declares another with reference to fabric ‘woven to look as though it were stitched in silk thread’.44 Modernity is conveyed by advertisements for other new materials and manufacturing methods, such as Zambrene ‘Rubberless Raincoats’, illustrated with a chic young woman standing out from the crowd in a modern cloche hat and sleek belted raincoat, and ‘“Ramada” Flannel’, marketed as ‘A Delightful New Flannel of Extreme Lightness and Delicacy’.45 Concurrently, reflecting the circular movement of fashion, other features in this Vogue issue allude to past trends in dress, including a special article on ‘The Fashions of the English Middle Ages’ and two fashion photographs depicting the contemporary revival in early Victorian styles. ‘Though there be nothing new under and including the sun’, asserts the caption alongside the image of a model in a full-skirted gown evoking the ‘Quaint Dresses of our Grandmothers’, ‘yet things have a way of looking fresh every morning’.46 Nostalgia for the perceived stability of earlier eras is evident here and in this issue’s society pages, which comprise two full-page photographic profiles of aristocratic women and a page of society snapshots of ‘Notable People in the Hunting World from Here and There’. The magazine’s idolization of the aristocracy and landed gentry is apparent from photographs of ‘charming débutantes’ and the Duke and Duchess of Rutland ‘in the beautiful grounds of the famous Belvoir Castle’.47 These pages, together with a three-page photo-feature on Dorchester House, a palatial mansion in Park Lane built in 1853 for the rich art collector R. S. Holford, reflect Vogue’s more conservative values including respect for tradition, hierarchy, patriarchy, and wealth. The issue’s second society portrait, a studio photograph by E. O. Hoppé of ‘Miss Brenda Hamilton’, introduces this attractive young woman with short modern bob as ‘the younger daughter of Lord Ernest Hamilton and cousin of the Duke of Abercorn’, who is ‘shortly to be married to the Count de Caramon Chimay, son of the Prince and Princesse de Chimay’.48 Despite the modishness signalled by her cropped hairstyle, this caption perpetuates the traditional patriarchal view that a woman’s identity is defined by her lineage and marriage. On the facing page, Vogue’s editorial yearns for ‘a Sanctuary’ from ‘the Rush and Complexity of Modern Life’ and further suggests the conservative modernity that characterizes this magazine’s conception of femininity.49 ‘With her crowded schedule of work and play’, the editor asserts, ‘the modern woman seems in danger of losing

Mediating Modernity  33 a certain reposeful grace […] which contributes to her own happiness and also to the pleasure of those about her’.50 ‘Occasional solitude’, ‘[l]ove of simple things’, and ‘appreciation of beauty’ are recommended to counteract ‘modern efficiency’ and ‘frank camaraderie’, while ‘enduring grace’ is framed as a woman’s most desirable attribute combining traditional and modern ideals of feminine beauty with a lure ‘as old as Sheba and as new as the latest coiffure’.51 The following double-page illustrates the ambivalent treatment given to modernist aesthetics in British Vogue prior to Todd’s tenure. An unsigned art review, ‘An Ancient and Two Moderns’, compares the sculpture of seventeenth-century artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini with recently exhibited works by two contemporary modernist sculptors, Frank Dobson and Jacob Epstein. Contrasting the simplicity of Dobson’s Pigeon Boy (1920) with the intricacy of a portrait bust by Bernini, the anonymous critic considers Dobson’s sculpture ‘interesting and beautiful’ but regrets that it is ‘preoccupied with pure form’.52 Dobson, illustrating the artistic approach of ‘the modern theorists’, ‘has concentrated […] on a single aspect of his subject—the beautiful contrast between the forms of the bird and the form of the human face’, the reviewer observes, where Bernini ‘would add every possible enrichment’ with ‘contrasts of texture as well as of form’ to show ‘a whirl of hair, a flutter of feathers, a windblown drapery’.53 Though the reviewer shows understanding of Dobson’s sculptural technique, it is clear they prefer the ‘prodigiously more complicated’ and more directly representational style of the ‘virtuoso’ Bernini.54 Epstein’s sculpture, in contrast, is received more favourably as ‘the work of an artist who does not see things in terms of Mr. Dobson’s simplified vision’ and who, while possessing ‘a wonderful sense of form and plastic values, […] is also interested in other aspects of life, in character, in the humanity of his models’.55 Seven pages on, in a feature drawn from American Vogue and tucked towards the back of this issue of the British edition, a revue produced by Paul Poiret, Saint-Granier, and Briquet at the Théâtre Michel is celebrated for its ‘audacity’, ‘wit and gaiety’, ‘sophisticated simplicity’, and its ‘decorations and costumes showing the pictorial genius of Paul Poiret’.56 This report of ‘Vogue, a Revue that has Captivated Paris’ is accompanied by illustrations of the striking modernist design that created its ‘succession of amusing compositions’, including three slender figures in full-length monochrome costumes representing the Game of Dominoes.57 The article alludes to exchanges between art, life, and fashion, observing Poiret is ‘not only a designer of costumes, but a painter whose extreme sensibility makes him a poet’, and finding it ‘curious to notice […] the theatre influencing our modes’ and ‘the immediate passing of an idea from the stage to private life’.58 The framing of fashion as art was common in early Vogue and the other fashion magazines considered in this study; it reflected the nineteenth-century birth of the individual

34  Mediating Modernity celebrity couturier in response to the growth of mass-produced fashion and the wider view of the designer as artist in this period. 59 This framing is also evident in this issue in a photo-feature describing new hats by ‘M. Zyrot’ as ‘Very Good Assurances of her Power as a Creative Artist’ and an advertisement marketing Condor Hats as ‘Artistic Creations’ with millinery designs depicted around the outside of an artist’s palette.60 ‘Monsieur Poiret has given us much to admire in this delightful new revue, whether we copy it or not’, Vogue’s reviewer concludes.61 Modernity, creativity, and innovation overlap repeatedly in this Early February 1922 issue, which seeks to position readers at the forefront of the mode with regard to fashion, art, and cultural trends while also voicing nostalgia for past styles and the stability of traditional conservative hierarchies of gender and class.

Eve In contrast to the other three magazines surveyed in this book, each of which were British editions of existing American titles, Eve was a thoroughly home-grown production. The magazine was launched by Sphere and Tatler Ltd. in November 1919 as a sister publication to The Tatler, a weekly periodical focusing on society and the stage founded in 1901 by Clement Shorter, formerly editor of the Illustrated London News. Eve was edited (at least initially) by Edward ‘Teddy’ Huskinson, then editor of The Tatler,62 and drew its name from the Tatler’s popular gossip column, ‘The Letters of Eve’, written by Olivia Maitland-Davidson and illustrated by Anne Harriet Fish (‘FISH’).63 Tatler’s fictional ‘Eve’, drawn in Fish’s distinctive style, became so well-loved during wartime that the column spawned four books and a series of short films, The Adventures of Eve (1918), produced by J. L. V. Leigh for Gaumont and starring Eileen Molyneux.64 The new magazine capitalized on this success and the two periodicals – The Tatler and Eve – were often marketed together and to each other’s readerships. An advertisement for The Tatler inside Eve on the 15 April 1920, for example, evoked the names of Davidson’s characters to present the two magazines as ‘the perfect complement’ to one another; ‘Eve reads EVE – Adam reads THE TATLER and then they change over with mutual pleasure and satisfaction’.65 Within Eve, however, the figure of Eve evolved far beyond the character of Davidson’s column. ‘Whereas in the Tatler, Eve spoke with one voice and bore one image’, as Elizabeth M. Sheehan has observed, ‘in Eve she appears in different guises’.66 Different versions of Eve were voiced by two regular Eve columns, ‘And Eve Said unto Adam’ and ‘Eve in PARadISe’, each providing gossipy and often satirical commentary on society news, fashions, and events – the former with a view from London/England and the latter from Paris. In addition, ‘Eve’ appeared in the title of most of the magazine’s routine features: ‘Eve and her

Mediating Modernity  35 Car’, ‘Eve in her Garden’, ‘Eve at the Play’, ‘Eve: Her Books and Music’, ‘Eve at Golf’, ‘Eve Goes Shopping’, and ‘The Jottings of Eve’.67 The magazine as a whole was presented as the product of ‘Eve’ (concealing its male editor); ‘It is the sincere wish of “EVE” that this, her first number’, the November 1919 issue asserted, ‘should prove to be a milestone marking the foundation of a long and lasting friendship between you, fair reader, and herself’.68 Yet, its readers could also be hailed as ‘Eves’; a poem addressing the difficult fate of the young unmarried woman was titled ‘To a Surplus Eve’, for example, while a review of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was addressed ‘to you […] ultra-modern Eves, so frank and so free’.69 Thus, this elastic persona – representing the young, smart, modern, wealthy, female socialite in all her guises – was positioned as both the magazine’s central consciousness, guiding its content, and the collective consciousness of its audience, epitomizing their outlook and interests. Eve was initially published monthly, but moved to weekly publication from 11 March 1920. Priced at a shilling and printed on large glossy paper (issues were 24.5 cm × 32 cm), the magazine targeted an affluent, leisured readership of upper- and upper-middle-class women, though it claimed to address ‘the woman of taste […] whether rich or poor’.70 The covers of early issues carried modern colour artwork reminiscent of Vogue’s covers in this period, but from August 1920 Eve’s front cover moved to a new format, more conservative in design, with a red masthead and large portrait, usually a photograph of an aristocratic woman or a contemporary female star (such as the dancer Irene Castle (2 Sep 1920) or actress and singer Dorothy Dickson (21 Oct 1920)), against the white page. Later in 1920, a single text banner advertisement was introduced at the bottom of many of Eve’s covers; products frequently marketed here include Cadbury’s chocolate, Viyella flannel, Iron Jelliods tonic, and State Express Cigarettes. Inside the front wrapper, Eve carried up to 30 pages of advertising (more usually, around ten pages) before a frontispiece serving as an inner cover, almost always bearing a photograph of a notable society personage, which marked the start of the magazine’s inner pages and its editorial and feature content. Longer articles were continued alongside advertising towards the back of the magazine. Eve followed the common nineteenth-century practice of numbering advertising pages separately from content pages, which, as Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman note, ‘eased their integration at the time of printing but also […] made it easy for libraries (or the publishers themselves) to discard those pages when copies were bound for permanent collection’.71 Clothing dominated the magazine’s commercial material accompanied by advertisements for health and beauty products, furniture and linens, confectionary and condiments, wireless radios and domestic appliances, cars and restaurants (mostly in London), and hotels and travel companies (selling destinations at home and abroad). This commercial content

36  Mediating Modernity addressed an audience of single women, married women, and mothers of young children, all with money for luxuries and time to enjoy them. Eve was billed in an early issue as ‘The New Paper for the New Woman’.72 ‘In its exuberance and its determination to break with the past’, Cynthia L. White asserts, ‘Eve embodied the spirit of the “roaring twenties”’.73 She identifies the magazine’s abandonment of content categories in favour of ‘a lively mixture of fiction, fashion, social notes, beauty, home-furnishing, recipes, sport and gossip’ all woven ‘into an extravagantly worded, sparkling narrative interspersed with exaggerated and fanciful illustrations’ as ‘entirely unconventional’.74 The magazine was closest to Vogue in its fusion of society and fashion content, but Eve was lighter in tone, more frivolous in outlook, and less uniformly polished in format, particularly in its first year of publication. This lack of uniformity, as White suggests, was itself radical and appeared more modern in comparison to the propriety and order of Vogue. On 2 March 1921, the magazine merged with the more established Lady’s Pictorial, in circulation since 1881, and the Women’s Supplement of The Times to become Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial. An editorial ‘To Our Readers— Old and New’ explained the amalgamation of the three periodicals and pledged to select ‘all that is best and most attractive in each’ to produce a magazine that ‘frankly caters for the woman of to-day and to-morrow who is interested in sports and in the open-air life, and yet retains live mental interests and a knowledge of affairs intimately connected with woman’s domestic life’.75 The editor’s claim that Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial would be ‘a clean, healthy English paper’, unlike ‘papers of a similar type [that] have in the near past been inclined to lean too much upon American or Parisian ideas’, indicates a desire to differentiate the magazine from Vogue. In reality, however, Paris was often the focus of Eve’s fashion content. Its fashion pages included the columns ‘What Paris Says’ and ‘Fashions for the Woman of To-Day and To-Morrow’ as well as ‘Eve in PARadISe’. Like Vogue, Eve’s issues also contained glamorous portraits of beautiful society women posed gracefully and snapshots of high society at play – for example, hunting, skiing, or at the races. Regular columns included ‘Over the Fireside’ by Richard King (Richard King Huskinson),76 popular essayist, journalist, and brother of Eve’s first editor, novelist Marthe Troly-Curtin’s ‘Salted Almonds’, and ‘Going to the Fair’, written by R. S. Hooper (later editor of The Bystander and The Tatler) under the pseudonym ‘Simple Simon’. Eve included a weekly book column (also written by Richard King from April 1925) and frequent theatre reviews, but otherwise its commentary on the arts was sporadic. Where Eve differed most from Vogue was in its inclusion of fiction, usually one or two short stories in each issue, sometimes accompanied by a serialized novel. In addition, Eve ran literary and fiction competitions – both before and after the amalgamation with the Lady’s Pictorial – inviting

Mediating Modernity  37 readers to submit their essays and stories for publication. Eve’s publication of reader contributions, lesser-quality genre fiction, and irregular arts commentary positions it as slightly less sophisticated than Vogue within the interwar women’s magazine market, though much of the magazine’s editorial and commercial content sought to appeal to its readers’ interest in cultivating good taste and refinement. In total, Eve’s weekly issues were generally between 50 and 80 pages in length, with its Christmas numbers – packed with extra fiction and advertisements for gifts – considerably longer. As Vike Plock has observed, for much of the 1920s, ‘[t]he story of Eve […] reads like one of consistent expansion and indicates commercial success’.77 In August 1926, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial also incorporated The Gentlewoman (1890–1926), another high quality women’s weekly. By 1927, however, the magazine was presumably under increasing financial pressure as its front wrapper began to carry a large advertisement as its main image, often disguised as an illustration or celebrity portrait such as those that usually adorned Eve’s covers. The 13 July 1927 issue, for example, bears a large colour image of the famous French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen, winner of six Wimbledon champions, putting on a pair of Len-Glen tennis shoes with the brand advertised only by the label visible on the shoe box by her foot (see Figure 1.1). This substitution of advertising for cover art or photography, combined with the overall reduction in the use of colour printing in Eve in this period, might suggest that the magazine was no longer flourishing. In April 1929, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial was itself subsumed by Britannia, a weekly current affairs magazine aimed chiefly at men, to create a new monthly magazine, Britannia and Eve, directed to both men and women.78 It would appear that the magazine’s run came to an end after a period of financial difficulty and, perhaps, falling sales. Unfortunately, it is not possible to verify this supposition through circulation data. Such data was often closely guarded by newspapers and magazines, and I have not found any circulation figures for Eve.79

Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial: 13 July 1927 The 13 July 1927 issue of Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial contains 60 pages. These comprise 8 pages of advertising between the outer wrapper and frontispiece, followed by 30 pages of content and then 22 pages integrating content and advertising. With the exception of the front wrapper image and an advertisement for Player’s cigarettes in blue ink on the back wrapper, there are no further colour pages in this issue though all pages are illustrated. Inside its internal cover, the magazine leads with a page of society snapshots and the column ‘Eve goes Fishing in the Social Seas’ as was usual in this period. Society news is the largest editorial content area, occupying 20% of the internal pages. Arts and culture

38  Mediating Modernity

Figure 1.1 Front cover, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927.

follow second, filling 12.5% pages, including reports of productions on stage and screen and a double-page spread for Richard King’s weekly literary review. Further routine features include ‘Eve in Paris’, ‘Eve at Golf’, ‘Eve and her Car’, ‘Eve goes Shopping’, ‘The Doggy World’ (a report of a recent dog show), Eve’s hostess column, and ‘The Girls’ Salon’,

Mediating Modernity  39 a children’s page inherited from The Gentlewoman, ‘For Girls who like Art, Music, Literature, Photography, etc.’.80 Faith Mackenzie’s ‘The Unattainable’, a one-page story billed as a ‘tragi-comedy of misplaced generosity and good intentions’, satirically depicts the negative outcome of a middle-class woman’s small act of charity.81 The issue’s two special articles comprise a light essay titled ‘Women’s Self-Sacrifice’ and an account by Phyllis H. Satterthwaite, herself a tennis player, of the best women’s performances at this year’s Wimbledon Championships. Fashion occupies only 8.5% of this issue’s editorial content: three pages of fashion illustrations plus the regular column ‘Cocktail Philosophy’. However, dress features heavily in the magazine’s commercial pages with advertisements for clothing, hats, and shoes from various London shops, including Summer sales at Gamages and Selfridge’s department stores. Accessories from leading brands (Ciro Pearls, Rolex watches, Técla jewellery) and beauty products are also prominent in this issue’s commercial matter and reflect Eve’s address to an affluent, aspirational female readership. Overall, advertising fills 35% of the available space. This Eve issue combines content that presents women as modern subjects with content that reinforces traditional models of femininity. The cover image of Suzanne Lenglen with fashionable bobbed hair and rouged lips in practical tennis dress, as well as subtly advertising LenGlen shoes, also celebrates Lenglen’s sporting success as ‘Last year’s holder of the Ladies’ Singles and the Mixed Doubles Championship at Wimbledon’ who has just ‘lost the Singles after a great match in the semi-final’.82 Satterthwaite’s article ‘Wimbledon Women in Retrospect’ is accompanied by eight further photographs of ‘outstanding’ female tennis players, mostly in action on the court at the recent championships.83 These images of women in motion, stretching and straining to return the ball, signal feminine modernity and contrast with the stylized fashion sketches of tall slender models with impossibly extended necks and tiny feet that appear on pages either side of this article. They contrast too with the more static photographs of society women posed gracefully earlier in this issue, such as Hugh Cecil’s studio photograph of ‘Mrs. S. S. Hammersley’, the wife of the M.P. for Stockport, standing in an elegant evening gown with its wide train laid out before her.84 The magazine’s frontispiece bears a more informal photographic portrait of the young Viscountess Folkestone seated on low steps in the garden of her Wiltshire home, smiling at one of the two small daughters by her side. In contrast to the Lenglen cover and Satterthwaite’s Wimbledon article, both of which recognize their female subjects for their achievements, the frontispiece’s caption describes Lady Folkestone as ‘Lord Radnor’s daughter-in-law’ who ‘was, before her marriage in 1922, Miss Helena Adeane of Babraham, […] a kinswoman through her mother of Lord Leconfield’.85 Her fame is derived from her class status and English aristocratic connections, both enhanced through her marriage, with no

40  Mediating Modernity indication of her own interests or accomplishments beyond being a wife and mother. Marriage and motherhood are central to much of this issue’s society content. Eve’s regular photo-page, ‘Getting Married’, announces seven recent marriages of society couples with wedding snapshots.86 The photogravure centrefold presents large photographic portraits of Lady Moira Combe and her two young children dressed in matching gingham outfits.87 The following page offers photographs of Lady Tweeddale and her baby, Lady Frances Hay, ‘the youngest of her family of four daughters’.88 These images, combined with Catherine Ives’s hostess column suggesting seasonal recipes for a July luncheon and dinner party, present a traditional patriarchal view that a woman’s duty is to husband and family and that her own identity will be sublimated in support of these.89 The magazine also reflects modern femininity, however, with particular attention to changing fashions in women’s dress and behaviour. Graham F. Abbott’s short essay, ‘Women’s Self-Sacrifice’, for example, humorously links ‘the no-dimensional space of a modern flat’ to new trends in women’s appearance.90 As ‘space in town became more limited, and living accommodation more cramped’, the essay fatuously poses, ‘[t]o fit the space, and with Fashion as her excuse, woman cheerfully threw her trains and flounces into the discard’, ‘discovered she had Legs’, ‘eliminated her curves’, ‘reduce[d] her body’ to a ‘slender’ figure, and gave her hair ‘the greatest cut of all’ with a ‘[b]ob, shingle, [or] crop’.91 The essay’s accompanying cartoon depicts two short-haired young women joyfully playing ukuleles in slim knee-length skirts watched by a disapproving man and woman in the formal evening dress of an earlier era. The illustration revels in the carefree attitude associated with the boyish modern flapper, while the essay offers an ironic view of this new style as a ‘sacrifice’.92 Four pages away, a captioned caricature of Radclyffe Hall inset in King’s book column similarly uses wit to mediate ambivalence towards new modes of womanhood. Hall is depicted by Paul Bloomfield with cropped hair, high collar, tailored jacket, and delicately thinned eyebrows above a caption that names her ‘Winner of the “Femina Prize” with “Adam’s Breed”’, her 1926 novel, and ‘in the front rank of those active women who carry off modern fashions in dress’.93 Bloomfield’s image, the description of Hall as ‘active’, and a subsequent reference to ‘her monocle’, ‘her parrot’, and ‘French bulldog’ (which Bloomfield has ‘not thought it necessary to introduce’) emphasize Hall’s masculine femininity, which was chic in this period, and her perceived eccentricity (notably this Eve issue was published prior to Hall’s overtly lesbian The Well of Loneliness (1928)).94 This captioned cartoon uses urbane humour to simultaneously applaud and hold at arm’s length the androgyny and unconventional female behaviour associated with this modern woman writer and, more widely, with modern women’s fashions in the

Mediating Modernity

41

1920s. Meanwhile, the book column that surrounds this caricature of Hall reflects satirically on the strict patriarchal social codes limiting the freedom and dress of women of a previous generation. Reviewing the memoirs of Percy Armytage, Gentleman Usher to the Royal Household, King writes derisively that ‘[l]ife must have been rather a trial to the “temperamental” in those days’ when a ‘lady never walked in [Hyde] Park except with a gentleman, either a near relation or a very intimate friend, and then only before luncheon’, and ‘to show an ankle deliberately was to cast the gravest doubts on the owner’s morality’.95 King expresses a modern outlook on late Victorian chaperonage and puritanical notions of sartorial modesty, regarding both with derision, and suggests sympathy with ‘the “temperamental”’ women, viewed then and now as difficult and unruly, who seek independence and do not conform to conventional gender norms. Plock has described how Eve’s ‘miscellaneous columns effectively negotiated a possible tension between tradition and modernity by alternating the occasional approval of progressive outlooks with a thinly veiled promotion of patriarchal standards and nationalist viewpoints’.96 In this 13 July 1927 issue, this negotiation takes place across columns as detailed above and within single features, such as ‘Eve and her Car’, which argues both that women are ‘good drivers’, capable of ‘competing against the pick of our racing drivers and, what is more, beating them at their own game’, and that women should remain prohibited from competing in meetings at the Brooklands race track, site of Britain’s first Grand Prix in 1926, because ‘this driving of small ultra-fast cars’ is ‘a dangerous game’ in which ‘[a]ccidents are bound to happen’, and ‘it would be doubly deplorable if one or more of these plucky women were involved in one’.97 The magazine’s content oscillates between progressive and patriarchal opinions on women’s lives, but repeatedly asserts its knowledge of the modern. In ‘The Picture Play’, Sydney Tremayne reviews Secrets of the Soul (1926), a German drama directed by G. W. Pabst depicting a troubled professor who undergoes Freudian analysis, asserting that the film’s ‘theme is utterly modern psycho-analysis, but its treatment is extremely old fashioned’ and ‘so serious that it makes one laugh’.98 ‘[P]erhaps I am wrong in calling psycho-analysis modern’, Tremayne reflects: when the man in the street has learned the patter, and complexes are aired over the tea cups in suburban drawing rooms I suppose it has become vieux-jeu, like a tune that has reached the barrel-organs or a fashion that has arrived at the wholesalers.99 Tremayne’s observation conflates modernity with fashion, suggesting that the modern is demarcated not only by newness but also by classbound exclusivity. It is also access to class-bound elite culture that this

42  Mediating Modernity Eve issue seeks to sell readers through its focus on high society, its illustrations of the latest styles from Paris designers, and its commentary on highbrow cultural events, from photographs of dancers performing in the new ‘six weeks season’ of the Ballet Russes to an account of ‘an excellent reading’ by the Sitwell siblings at the Chenil Galleries.100 The magazine’s attention to modernity is conversely bound to its conservative underpinning by traditional hierarchies of culture and class.

Good Housekeeping The British edition of Good Housekeeping was launched in March 1922 by the National Magazine Company, a subsidiary of the American publisher William Randolph Hearst’s media empire. Good Housekeeping had been in print in America since May 1885 and purchased by Hearst in 1911, who transformed it into ‘a large flat quality slick magazine’ combining home and fashion with fiction by well-known authors.101 British Good Housekeeping continued this formula and was edited initially by J. Y. McPeake with Alice Head as assistant editor. Head, who had begun her career as a shorthand typist at George Newnes’s Country Life for £1 a week, succeeded McPeake as editor and director of Good Housekeeping from 1924 to 1939, a position in which she was rumoured to be the highest paid woman in Britain.102 This American import was the most successful of a new range of ‘service’ monthlies emerging in Britain in the interwar period which, as Brian Braithwaite notes, sought ‘to reflect the radical social changes witnessed in the aftermath of the Great War’ and, in particular, the increased number of middle-class housewives ‘fend[ing] for themselves’ in the home.103 Reaching out to this market, Good Housekeeping’s first issue addressed the ‘houseproud woman in these days of servant shortage’ and promised to lessen her ‘burdens’ with expert domestic and consumer advice.104 ‘Magazines like Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Own, Woman’s Sphere and Woman and Home’, Giles describes, ‘addressed their women readers as professional homemakers, interested in the latest technology and concerned about housework, childcare and appearance’.105 In 1924, the British Good Housekeeping Institute was founded with its soon famous ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval’ to guide readers to the best products for feeding, cleaning, and running a household. In common with other service magazines of the period, and directed by the marketing strategies of manufacturers and retailers of domestic goods in this period, Good Housekeeping recast domestic labour as skilled work requiring specialist knowledge, rational planning, and the most up-to-date housekeeping methods and appliances. Its routine content included informative and instructive articles and product reviews by experts from different departments: Cookery, Household Engineering and Housecraft, Furnishing and Decoration, Housing, Fashions, Dressmaking, Needlework, For

Mediating Modernity  43 and About Children, and Health and Beauty. These articles frequently recommended products advertised elsewhere in the magazine, blurring the distinction between commercial and editorial content. Alongside this domestic advice, Good Housekeeping pledged to entertain readers with ‘good fiction’ by ‘our greatest and best-known novelists’ and features on ‘art, music, and the drama, and the social side of life’.106 The magazine regularly printed six or more pieces of fiction with short stories and serialized novels in each issue by successful authors such as J. D. Beresford, E. M. Delafield, John Galsworthy, Stella Gibbons, and W. Somerset Maugham. Mike Ashley identifies Good Housekeeping as ‘one of the premier fiction-carrying magazines in Britain’ during the interwar period.107 The magazine also printed poetry, though this was weaker in quality – usually one illustrated poem and a handful of short verses sentimental in topic and style. Clemence Dane (Winifred Ashton) wrote a monthly book essay between 1923 and 1933, succeeded by Winifred Holtby from 1933 until her death in 1935, and then by Beatrice Kean Seymour.108 In addition, Good Housekeeping prided itself on paying attention to contemporary political and social issues as they affected women and promised to print ‘illuminating articles on great Social Questions’.109 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Head commissioned articles by prominent women writers, activists, politicians, and other professional women, including Violet Bonham Carter (a regular contributor), Winifred Holtby, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, and Ellen Wilkinson, on subjects such as divorce reform, social mobility, the inequality of the sexes, international trade, and the workings of Parliament. Backed by an international publisher and lavishly illustrated, including some colour, White suggests ‘the magazine offered incomparable value at a cover price of one shilling, and had no rival’.110 Braithwaite documents the first issue of 150,000 copies sold out.111 Good Housekeeping acquired a loyal readership; two years later, in 1924, the magazine’s circulation was recorded as 144,479 in The Advertiser’s ABC and it is estimated to have remained at 123,000 in 1938.112 Good Housekeeping’s pages were 22 cm × 30 cm in size, slightly smaller than Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar, but of good quality paper (lighter weight than the fashion periodicals) which distinguished this service magazine from cheaper domestic monthlies. Issues became steadily bigger in volume during the first three years of publication indicating Good Housekeeping’s success and the increasing revenue the magazine could command through advertising, which often filled a third or more of its pages. By 1925, the magazine’s monthly issues were routinely around 200–250 pages in length (considerably larger in volume than the other three periodicals reviewed in this chapter) and stayed around this size through the interwar period. Three or four full-page advertisements usually appeared at the front of the magazine (the health benefits of Ovaltine malted drink

44  Mediating Modernity for women and children were almost invariably advocated opposite the table of contents), followed by 65–100 pages of uninterrupted editorial and feature content and then as many as 150 pages shared by advertising and content. Fiction and features were split to force the reader into the advertising pages, with the latter portion of stories and articles continued in columns printed alongside advertisements towards the back of the magazine. Unlike Vogue and Eve, which numbered advertising pages separately, Good Housekeeping’s pages were numbered consecutively throughout, minimizing the distinction between editorial and commercial material. An index to advertisements enabled readers to use this magazine as a commercial catalogue. Editorial footers reassured readers that ‘Advertised Goods are Good Goods’ and ‘All advertisements in GOOD HOUSEKEEPING are guaranteed’. Commonly advertised items include food products, house furnishings, domestic appliances, women’s and children’s clothes, fabrics and sewing machines, toiletries, household cleaning products, and cooking utensils. This advertising addressed a readership of middle-class housewives and supported Good Housekeeping’s stated mission to keep them informed of the latest and best products for maintaining the health and appearance of themselves, their families, and their homes. ‘Our Shopping Service’ recommended clothes and household items for purchase with an editorial pledge that any article illustrated here or in the advertisement columns could be ordered through Good Housekeeping by readers who are out of reach of London. Special instructions for readers from the Irish Free State and Britain’s colonies indicate the breadth of the magazine’s circulation. It should be noted, however, that while interwar Good Housekeeping occasionally featured articles about the domestic life or cuisine of people of different races from around Britain’s empire and beyond, these frequently conveyed imperialist assumptions of white superiority. The housewives and families the magazine routinely addressed and depicted were white. While Good Housekeeping’s primary audience was married homemakers, the magazine also included articles directed to single working women living independently, such as Phyllis Peck’s ‘Meals for the Business Girl’ (October 1932). Its cover illustrations in the 1920s and 1930s (shared with the US edition) usually presented a child or group of children – invariably well-dressed, well-nourished, and with rosy cheeks suggesting health and contentment. These images assume a happy and comfortable family life is the reader’s ultimate goal, even if they are not currently married with children. The largely middle-class readers of Good Housekeeping might be running a home alone or with the aid of a servant, but crucially the magazine addressed all housewives as professional household managers regardless of whether or not they had domestic staff under their direction. ‘The rhetoric of scientific management and industrial rationalisation […] was quickly adapted to

Mediating Modernity  45

Figure 1.2 P. L. Garbutt, ‘Washing Day, 1934 Style’, Good Housekeeping, July 1934.

discussing women’s work within the home’ in the early twentieth century, Giles identifies, ‘and nowhere more vigorously than in the proliferating women’s magazines of the period’.113 ‘Say good-bye to drudgery at home laundry work’, urged a typical illustrated domestic article from Good Housekeeping in July 1934, for example, that recommends ‘upto-date equipment’ that has been ‘tested and found efficient’ to enable the modern housewife to ‘complet[e] the weekly wash […] without undue strain and effort’ (Figure 1.2).114 Photographs of women completing domestic tasks in white laboratory-style coats, as Hackney notes, ‘re-imagine housewifery’ as a scientific, professional, and ‘thoroughly modern job’.115 Good Housekeeping encouraged the perception of the industrious homemaker as a competent and rational citizen making a vital contribution to society by managing her essential work with efficiency and skill. Alongside other service magazines of the period, Good Housekeeping professionalized housework and framed it as an expression of women’s citizenship. Where Good Housekeeping differed from contemporary service magazines, as Giles observes, was in the range of ‘cultural identifies [it] offered’ and in its insistence ‘that the “modern” housewife will not be totally preoccupied by her domestic tasks’ but will use ‘time released by her use of more efficient methods of housekeeping’ to look out

46  Mediating Modernity from the home.116 Interwar Good Housekeeping never challenged the perception of housekeeping as woman’s work, but the magazine also promoted women’s entry into and engagement with the public sphere. In addition to special articles on social questions, a regular series showcased different careers for women, ranging from journalism (April 1922) to radiography (September 1929), and, beginning in late 1931, a monthly column by barrister and women’s rights campaigner Helena Normanton reviewed current affairs including national and international politics. As I have argued elsewhere, early British Good Housekeeping contained a sustained undercurrent of feminist politics with an increasingly prominent pacifist-internationalist outlook in the interwar period.117 This feminism existed alongside conservatism, however, as the magazine drew on the language of citizenship widely used by women’s organizations in this period to debate women’s social role without rejecting their identity as homemaker.118 Indeed, interwar Good Housekeeping positioned women’s domestic labour as the very source and evidence of women’s capacity for rational thought, efficient organization, and economic sense.

Good Housekeeping: May 1930 The cover of the May 1930 issue of Good Housekeeping is typical in format with a coloured banner at the head of the page presenting the magazine’s title, another banner at the bottom announcing this issue’s featured contributors, and a large sentimental illustration between depicting two young children in muted pastel colours (see Figure 1.3). A boy looks up from his marbles and watches patiently as his toddler sibling picks up and examines one of the small coloured balls. This idealized family scene was drawn by Jessie Willcox Smith (who regularly supplied Good Housekeeping’s cover art until 1934) and conveys the magazine’s domestic focus. Inside, Good Housekeeping was also heavily illustrated; of this issue’s 238 pages, only 5 do not include illustration and 24 pages include colour. These comprise 13 pages with 1 colour highlights, 2 two-colour pages, and 9 pages in full colour, of which 3 are photographic and 6 illustration. Eight of the colour pages are fullpage advertisements, which seek to sell domestic appliances (Hoover vacuum cleaners, a Delux Mainamel gas cooker), branded food items (Rowntree’s jelly, Fyffes bananas, Brown & Polson’s corn flour), soft furnishings (Tootal bed linen and Tootal furnishing fabrics), and Pratts petrol and motor oil. Advertising fills 42% of this issue’s internal pages. A sample double-page towards the back of the magazine includes advertisements for sweet and savoury preserves, wines, furniture, a tonic for indigestion, electrolysis for the removal of facial hair, a notice from the British Electrical Development Association, and a notice for Good Housekeeping’s Employment Bureau directed to both employers looking for ‘lady cooks and housekeepers’ (whether in ‘tea-rooms’, ‘schools’, ‘clubs’, or ‘private houses and flats’) and women looking for employment

Mediating Modernity  47

Figure 1.3 Front cover, Good Housekeeping, May 1930 (discolouration at bottom and right edge due to mildew damage).

‘who have been trained in Domestic Science, or who are qualified by experience in any branch of the work’.119 ‘Is Your Home a Really Electric One?’ asks the advertisement from the British Electrical Development Association, asserting that the ‘really modern home should have electric plug points in every room’ for ‘the wonderful convenience of electric helps such as an Electric Vacuum Cleaner, Floor Polisher, Washing Machine or Iron’.120 The home is both sentimentalized and presented as a

48  Mediating Modernity site of technological and scientific modernity within this Good Housekeeping issue. Fiction heads the list of contents and occupies 31% of the magazine’s internal pages. This issue contains three short stories (by Philip Gibbs, Elizabeth Benneche Petersen, and Mary Singer) and instalments from three serialized novels: Francis Brett Young’s ‘Young Love’ (later Jim Redlake), Margaret Kennedy’s The Fool of the Family, and Marion Cran’s The Lusty Pal. Most of these narratives contain a romantic element and this fiction largely projects conservative values. ‘All progress, as it is called, leaves a certain number of people stranded’, begins Gibbs’s ‘Melody in A Minor’, for example, a tragic romance centring on an elderly violinist who loses his job at a London ‘picture palace’ due to the arrival of the ‘new talking pictures’.121 Special articles include occasional essays by Joan Sutherland, Winifred Holtby, St. John Ervine, Sidney Dark, and Cecil Webb-Johnson (on fatalism, travel, loneliness, humour, and marriage), and, with top billing, the ‘first authorised interview’ with King Michael I of Romania, then eight years old and in the care of his mother and a regency council following his father’s abdication.122 Clemence Dane supplies her usual book column, William S. Murphy describes examples of ‘Metallic Embroidery’ from India at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Mary Fraser writes on the history of ‘The British School at Rome’. The remaining special articles are on more practical subjects, including W. M. W. Thomas on ‘Clean GearChanging’ and Helena Normanton’s ‘Watch Your Reassessments!’ Kathleen M. Barrow writes admiringly of small flats from the United Women’s Homes Association for single women and Anne Dillon- Clarke recommends the career of ‘Visiting Photographer’. Roughly 10% of the magazine is domestic advice and ideas for the housewife. From the Good Housekeeping Institute, there are recipes for cakes and jellies, recommendations for small household appliances, articles on choosing notepaper, the necessity of clean milk, hygienic coverings for the kitchen table, and ‘The Housekeeper’s Dictionary of Facts’. There are also three features on furnishing and decoration showcasing beds, a married medical woman’s flat, and a modern living-room, the latter illustrated with colour photogravure. For children, this issue includes an adventure story and a colour-illustrated article about a baby elephant, the second in a series on ‘Babies of the African Jungle’. There are seven pages on fashions, all with black-and-white illustrations, a beauty feature on skincare, a double-page spread for Good Housekeeping’s ‘Shopping Service’, and reader letters with replies from the magazine’s ‘Health Questionnaire’. Across this Good Housekeeping issue, homemaking is presented as a distinctly modern enterprise reflecting modern attitudes and requiring modern methods. ‘We cannot, of course, give way to all baby’s desires or even fears’, admits Len Chaloner in an article on bringing up children

Mediating Modernity  49 in their second year, but ‘[w]e achieve little by being autocratic’.123 Chaloner advocates a gentler, more rational, modern approach to childrearing by which ‘we look in time to modify both within the limits of reason, and so produce a more balanced personality than by the old-fashioned methods’.124 P. L. Garbutt’s ‘Hygienic Table Coverings’ similarly contrasts the ‘old-fashioned housewife of a generation or so ago’, who directed ‘two or three maids’ and was ‘firmly convinced that scrupulous cleanliness could only be achieved by the expenditure of a considerable amount of energy and much heavy scrubbing and cleaning’, with the modern housewife, working alone or ‘possibly with the help of a general maid’, for whom ‘everything selected for the kitchen should be such that can be kept clean with the minimum amount of work’.125 Her article identifies rising wages and the lack of cheap, ‘plentiful’ domestic help as the reason why it is ‘of such vital importance’ for the modern ‘mistress’ or housewife ‘to reduce all unnecessary labour’.126 The middle-class woman who ‘often undertakes all the cooking, housework and even care of the children’ should ‘have the use of labour-saving appliances as far as possible’ and choose domestic items that are easy to clean, Garbutt suggests, such as a cooker with ‘an easily cleaned enamelled finish’ or a kitchen table covered with enamelled iron or glass to avoid the ‘daily scrubbing’ required by using ‘the old white-wood table’.127 Holder of a ‘First Class Diploma’ from ‘King’s College of Household and Social Science’, Garbutt was one of the Good Housekeeping Institute’s chief experts and a regular contributor of instructive domestic articles such as this one complemented by photographs of the equipment it recommends.128 Garbutt’s article powerfully demonstrates the commercialization of the home, another vital context for the modernization of women’s domestic work. Where the ‘old-fashioned housewife’ believed that a clean home is achieved through the expenditure of energy and labour, Good Housekeeping encourages the contemporary housewife to believe that a clean home can be achieved through the expenditure of money on new domestic products and the acquisition of professional housekeeping knowledge – gained through purchasing Good Housekeeping – that will together minimize the task. Driven by the rise in consumer capitalism, this view is perpetuated by both the magazine’s editorial and commercial content, between which there are significant overlaps. Garbutt’s endorsement of the benefits of an enamelled cooker in this article is echoed later, for example, by the selection of ‘An Enamelled Gas Cooker’ as ‘This Month’s Selected Appliance’ in an unsigned product review that again advocates the need for ‘an up-to-date kitchen fitted with attractive easily cleaned modern equipment’ in contrast to the ‘old-fashioned and often dark, badly ventilated kitchen’.129 The review does not explicitly name a branded product, but is headed by a photograph of a woman cooking at the same Deluxe Mainamel cooker that is

50  Mediating Modernity also pictured in this issue in a prominent full-page colour advertisement with the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Seal of Approval. ‘The cooker illustrated is one on which tests have recently been completed in the Institute’, the review states: ‘It is a reasonably priced model’ with ‘an easily cleaned enamelled surface’ and ‘automatic oven control […] whereby the temperature can be regulated’.130 ‘A really wonderful cooker in every way’, the hyperbolic copy of the Deluxe Mainamel advertisement declares, it has been ‘scientifically designed and beautifully finished in a hard-as-flint enamel that looks and cleans just like china’.131 The language of Good Housekeeping’s product review is more tempered, but emphasizes the same qualities of hygiene, scientific design, and technological innovation, which were all connected to the wider discourse of ‘domestic efficiency’ that thrived in this period as advertisers promoted the modernization of the home through the purchase of new products and appliances.132 While domestic modernity is celebrated in this Good Housekeeping issue, the magazine also links the home with traditional ideas of gender and national identity. Images of women engaged in housework across the issue’s articles and advertisements position the home as women’s domain and the site of their labour. The notion of home was also powerfully linked with English nationalism in the wake of the First World War. ‘Although this is an age of invention’, asserts Kenneth Dalgliesh in ‘£900 builds an Old World Cottage’, ‘no modern architect has yet evolved a type of building more in keeping with our countryside’ than the ‘characteristically English houses and cottages which form an integral part of the landscape’.133 Like many such nostalgic photo-features in interwar Good Housekeeping, this article is complemented by photographs of a white-walled cottage with thatched roof and wood-beamed interiors. It sentimentalizes traditional housing designs and the rural English landscape, both symbolic of English heritage, and reflects the interwar fashion for new houses designed according to past architectural styles.134 More broadly, this article is part of the contemporary ‘redefinition of Englishness’ as insular and domestic that Light observes in the interwar period as a response to international conflict and declining empire, which she argues should also be understood as a radical realignment of national identity to admit women.135 This Good Housekeeping issue contains a range of advertisements appealing to the female reader’s patriotism: from ‘Chivers’ Olde English Marmalade’ and ‘Diploma: The English Crustless Cheese’ to Yardly Lavender perfume ‘For the English Girl’.136 A full-page advertisement from the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a government body set up in 1926 to boost British trade, proposes the ‘best guarantee of peace we can give the world is a united and prosperous British Empire’ and urges ‘[e]very man and woman’ to ‘help to provide that guarantee by buying Empire produce’.137 Following the

Mediating Modernity  51 Wall Street Crash of 1929, housewives were increasingly encouraged by the EMB and commercial advertisers to use their spending power to support the domestic economy.138 This rhetoric progressively emphasized women’s citizenship, but also perpetuated the traditional view that managing the home and its budget was women’s most valuable contribution to the nation. In contrast, a number of this issue’s special articles look firmly beyond the English home. Most pertinently, Winifred Holtby’s ‘The Third-Class Adventurer’ gives an entertaining account of her experiences of travelling on a budget with a companion through Europe and tangentially discloses her socialist politics and her pacifist internationalism. Describing ‘a social gathering, part concert—part political meeting, with about 30 men and girls from a razor-factory’ while travelling in Germany, Holtby amusingly recalls participating in ‘a heated discussion on the future of the British Labour Party, the French occupation of the Rhine, the influence of America in Europe, and whether long hair would ever really return to fashion’ while ‘my intrepid friend [gave] a lecture in German on the League of Nations’.139 The juxtaposition of pressing questions regarding national and international politics and women’s hairstyles suggests each of these subjects are and should be of concern to women. An advertisement for Kotex later in the magazine also smoothly links the personal and the political by asserting that ‘old-fashioned methods of [menstrual] protection’ are unsuitable for contemporary women who ‘are beginning to take their share in public life’.140 The advertisement alludes to the recent enfranchisement of Turkish women in 1930 and claims that ‘Up-to-date women in Turkey use Kotex Sanitary Pads because they exactly fulfil modern requirements’.141 It implicitly draws a connection between female enfranchisement and disposable sanitary pads to frame the latter as empowering and liberating. Both Holtby’s article and the Kotex advertisement position the modern woman as a participant in public life and welcome this departure from traditional gender roles. Within and beyond its domestic content, this Good Housekeeping issue urges the female reader to consider herself a modern subject and to negotiate her own responses to modernity.

Harper’s Bazaar The origins of Harper’s Bazaar (UK) were in a women’s weekly magazine first issued by the Harper brothers in New York in 1867 modelled on Berlin-based Der Bazar.142 In 1913, the magazine was purchased by William Randolph Hearst, who, in a bid to rival Vogue, turned Harper’s Bazar (the extra ‘a’ was not added until 1929) into ‘a thick, glossy, chic, lavishly illustrated monthly devoted to fashions, beauty, fiction, and belles-lettres’.143 A British edition of Harper’s Bazaar was

52  Mediating Modernity launched by the National Magazine Company in October 1929 and edited autonomously from London, but shared cover art, fashion layouts, and some feature content with its older American sibling throughout the 1930s. Phyllis Joyce Reynolds was general editor from 1929 to 1945 with Alan Y. McPeake as art and fiction editor.144 An advertisement for the first British edition in Punch announced the magazine’s arrival with a whimsical illustration of the October 1929 issue strutting through an open door on feminine legs with bowing footman either side (Figure 1.4). The image conveys the magazine’s ambition, proclaimed in the accompanying text, to be ‘most magnificent Society periodical ever produced in this country’, while the concluding instruction urges potential readers to ‘Order Harper’s Bazaar from your newsagent NOW, imperiously—as one who must be obeyed’.145 This advert humorously suggests that buying this magazine will signify superiority – or rather, more precisely, that it permits the (probably middle-class) reader to perform superiority and membership of an elite readership by imitating ‘one who must be obeyed’. Early advertisements for Harper’s Bazaar emphasized the magazine’s urbane wit and sophistication as much as its society and fashion content. A ‘Note of Warning for Men Only’ inside the front cover of Good Housekeeping in May 1930 cautioned ‘Women & Elephants Never Forget an Injury’ and thus advised ‘do not forget to buy Harper’s Bazaar for your women (not elephant) friends’.146 The accompanying cartoon by Aubrey Hammond depicts an elephant and a woman looking furious, the latter a caricature of feminine modernity with cropped hair, knee-length dress, and painted face, while the caption declares the magazine ‘the most luxurious magazine in the world for women’.147 Harper’s Bazaar was the largest and most expensive of the four magazines surveyed in this book. Priced at two shillings, it was printed on glossy paper with its pages measuring 24 cm × 32.5 cm. In its early years, the British edition emulated the modernity and expansive cultural sophistication of American smart magazines, with which J. B. Priestley implicitly aligned the magazine even as he rejected the comparison in a signed, celebrity endorsement from October 1930: “Harper’s Bazaar” is at once so very feminine, dashing and bangup-to-the-minute that it terrifies me. Nevertheless, I notice with pleasure that it seems to be breaking with what is – to me – the dreary tradition of the “smart” magazine. Thus, it has brought in, as regular contributors, such writers as Ivor Brown and Frank Swinnerton, men of very solid merit, and it looks like offering a fine pasture for some of the younger writers.148 Priestley’s statement positions British Harper’s Bazaar as simultaneously ‘feminine’ in its sensitivity to fashion and cultural trends and

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Figure 1.4 Advertisement  for Harper’s Bazaar in Punch, 2 October 1929.

implicitly masculine in its attention to high culture. By printing serious writers – Priestley’s ‘men of very solid merit’ – the magazine sought to appeal to, and create, an educated, cultured, female readership. Indirect comparison with American smart magazines was also suggested by the tagline ‘INCORPORATING “VANITY FAIR”’ on the magazine’s front covers, which evoked another periodical owned by the National Magazine Company that had ceased publication in 1929, but the association with Nast’s Vanity Fair can hardly have been unwelcome.149 During 1929–39, Harper’s Bazaar’s monthly issues usually contained around 100–130 pages with content organized under the headings Paris and London Fashions, Fiction, and Society and Special

54  Mediating Modernity Features. Fashion pages were generously illustrated with some plates in glorious colour. The inclusion of fiction significantly distinguished Harper’s Bazaar from Vogue, its chief competitor, which did not routinely print fiction even during the Todd years. Stories and serials were printed by successful authors including E. M. Delafield, W. Somerset Maugham, Nancy Mitford, Harold Nicolson, Dorothy Parker, Vita Sackville-West, and Evelyn Waugh. Poems appeared from Richard Aldington, Viola Meynell, Margaret Sackville, and Osbert Sitwell among others. Harper’s Bazaar’s wide-ranging tastes reflect middlebrow eclecticism and skipped lightly across highbrow and popular literature, and between intellectual and commercial culture. The lyrics of Cole Porter’s ‘Dressing Daughter for Dinner’ were printed in the magazine in January 1934, for example, presented in the same format as an illustrated poem listing a string of contemporary branded and non-branded accessories and beauty products from ‘floris toilet water’ to ‘eye-tebs’ false lashes.150 Reynolds, the magazine’s first editor, assumed and expanded the reader’s interests in the ballet, the visual arts, classical and popular music, highbrow literature, best-selling fiction, and the cinema by printing signed articles on these subjects from an array of high-profile writers, such as Ivor Brown’s ‘Yes, I like the Talkies’ (January 1930), Edith Sitwell’s ‘Musical Parties I Have Really Enjoyed’ (November 1932), Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘What Hope for Poetry? (December 1935), and Gertrude Stein’s ‘Why I like Detective Stories’ (November 1937). Special Features also encompassed literary, art, and theatre criticism and features on interior design and travel. Frank Swinnerton contributed a monthly book column during 1929– 30, which was taken over by the novelist and poet Sylvia Lynd from January 1931. Well-known artists and art critics reviewed exhibitions of classical and modern works. In March 1930, R. H. Wilenski introduced readers to ‘modern sculptural experiments’ by Barbara Hepworth, Eric Kennington, Alan Durst, and Maurice Lambert, which ‘are rarely seen by the general public that does not frequent the oneman shows’.151 This telling comment positions Harper’s Bazaar’s readers as likely part of that ‘general public’, but desiring entry into and knowledge of the smaller exhibitions frequented by an elite community of artists and art-lovers. By 1938, the magazine’s circulation had reached an estimated 35,000–40,000.152 Advertising in interwar Harper’s Bazaar largely addressed an audience of middle-class women coveting the chic, leisured lifestyle associated with the rich. ‘An Index to Advertisements’ towards the back of the magazine promised that ‘[t]he advertisements in “Harper’s Bazaar” form a social register of fashionable products, places and shops’.153 Several opening pages of advertising surrounded the contents list, but the majority of commercial matter was integrated in the latter half of

Mediating Modernity  55 each issue, where, in common with the other periodicals surveyed in this chapter, articles and fiction were concluded to draw readers into this section of the magazine. Illustrated and photographic advertisements of glamorous female models in designer clothes, furs, jewellery, hats, and other accessories complemented the magazine’s internal fashion content and served to fuel its aspirational fantasies. Other products marketed included everyday commodities for the affluent, such as petrol and branded alcoholic and soft drinks, and luxuries ranging from costly beauty treatments and cosmetic procedures to Ampico player pianos, modernist furniture, and international travel. ‘Travel, in the earlier twentieth century, was a symbol of achievement, cultural literacy, savoir faire, and personal means’, observe Hammill and Smith in their study of mainstream Canadian magazines.154 Vogue, too, printed advertisements for upmarket hotels at home and abroad and operators of railways and ocean liners in the 1930s. Harper’s Bazaar’s advertising enhanced the magazine’s visual appeal and supported its editorial project to promote an elite culture that the reader was invited to join whether through the actual purchase of luxury goods or the imaginative consumption of them. Like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar conveyed its high cultural value and modernity through its bright, bold cover designs, its modernistinspired fashion illustration, and, as the 1930s progressed, its uncluttered layouts and the use of colour photography. The magazine’s exquisite internal fashion plates used geometric forms and flat blocks of contrasting colours. Its art deco covers were frequently illustrated by Erté, who produced over 200 covers for the magazine between 1915 and 1938, and usually depicted a stylized female face or figure engaged in a leisure activity associated with the upper classes (such as sailing or skiing) or against a seasonal background.155 Colour photography was introduced for some covers from the mid-1930s. The most significant change in the magazine’s appearance came when Carmel Snow, a former assistant editor at American Vogue, became Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar and hired Alexey Brodovitch as art director in 1934. A Russian-born designer who had lived in Paris for a decade before moving to New York in 1930, Brodovitch revolutionized the visual style of Harper’s Bazaar through his enthusiasm for avant-garde aesthetics. He favoured a ‘dynamic look in fashion photography’ and ‘encouraged his photographers to express themselves more and shoot on location, setting the models free to move’.156 Early in his tenure, he invited the surrealist Man Ray to produce fashion photographs for the magazine.157 Brodovitch’s layouts integrated images and text, making use of cropped photographs and generous white space in ways which, Willis Hartshorn contends, not only ‘changed the look of that publication’, but also, ‘in the end,

56  Mediating Modernity

Figure 1.5 Front cover, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934.

the look of American magazines in general’.158 The result was strikingly different to the crowded layouts of studio portraits and cramped text common in fashion magazines of the 1920s and anticipated the look of post-war women’s magazines.

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Harper’s Bazaar: August 1934 In Erté’s cover illustration for the August 1934 issue (Figure 1.5), a woman in evening dress appears on the far left-hand side of the composition poised to ascend the bright white steps that dominate the image. Only a sliver of her face is visible in profile in the top-left corner. Her blue dress with white stars matches the deep blue night sky backdrop and her flared skirt parallels the gradient of the steps. The reader’s gaze is directed past the figure to the magazine’s title and down to the list of celebrity contributors advertised in the bottom right-hand corner. Erté’s design conveys exclusivity, glitz, and glamour. The cover suggests the magazine itself is as an elite social and cultural event, which the reader is invited to enter alongside the chic figure depicted simply by turning the page. Inside, the theme of elite leisure continues with an editorial list recommending ‘first-class Hotels and Restaurants’ in England, printed in two slanted columns of text on the inside front cover, mirrored on the inside back cover by lists of hotels elsewhere in the UK, across continental Europe, and in Palestine, Morocco, Egypt, and Malaysia.159 These lists routinely spanned the inner covers of Harper’s Bazaar around this time, but are particularly germane to this ‘Holiday Fiction and Fashions’ number in which luxury travel is the focus of a good deal of editorial and commercial content. The different features of this August 1934 issue work together to create an atmosphere of social and cultural sophistication in which modernity is highly prized. The magazine has 98 pages, nine of which include one colour highlights. Fashion is the largest content area and takes up 31% of the available space. Two pages report on children’s fashions while the rest cover fashions for women. Eighteen pages feature line-drawn fashion illustrations (seven with colour) and 13 pages use photography, including numerous images that reflect the modern style of informal, open-air fashion photography associated with, among others, Jean Moral, one of Harper’s Bazaar’s chief photographers whose work features across this issue. One double-page, for example, presents staged snapshots of society women interacting apparently naturally with flower-sellers out on the city streets. Captions detail their attire such as ‘the Hon. Mrs. James Beck’, an English socialite, in ‘a Schiaparelli suit in black Chichi’ and the English actress ‘Miss Heather Thatcher’ in ‘Schiaparelli’s black cloth coat with huge, starched linen collar and cuffs that outGarbo Garbo’.160 Society coverage fills a further 7% and comprises the monthly gossip column ‘Vanity Fair’ and seven pages of photographs of high society spectating and socializing at the British Grand Prix, Ascot, Lord’s, and Longchamps. Fiction occupies 18% of the magazine, with the third instalment in Evelyn Waugh’s serial ‘A Flat in London’ (later A Handful of Dust), the first portion of a two-part story by Margery Sharp, and short fiction by Henry Maude Williams, Morley Callaghan,

58  Mediating Modernity Nelia Gardner White. The theme of elite travel is reflected in most of the issue’s special articles; Seymour Leslie writes on upper-class English visitors to Austria, Rosita Forbes caricatures different kinds of holidaymakers and their favourite haunts, and Harold Nicolson’s light essay ‘When Travelling’ proposes ‘the necessity’ of choosing as a travel companion ‘someone who is both unfailingly generous and enormously rich’.161 In addition, Ford Madox Ford describes the experience of returning to his native city in ‘London Does Not Change Very Much’ and Princess Nathalie Troubetskoy’s ‘Globe-Trotting in London’ details international cuisine available for those unable to travel. ‘A Palace for the Maharajah of Indore’ presents nine photographs of the interiors and architecture of, allegedly, ‘the first modern palace in India to combine European domestic culture with Indian modes of living’.162 Sylvia Lynd’s book review surveys ‘Holiday Fiction’, giving most space to Kate O’Brien’s novel The Ante-Room with praise too for Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘new view of words’ and ‘new view of life’ in The Cat Jumps and Other Stories.163 Muriel Cox’s beauty column promotes products to revive skin and nails after ‘sun-baking’ and ‘sea-bathing’.164 An illustrated full-page advertisement for the prestigious jeweller Cartier depicts a lithe young woman in fashionable white bathing suit passing her jewellery to a friend before entering the pool at ‘Somewhere-on-Sea’.165 Commercial matter fills 16% in total and includes advertisements for clothes and accessories (largely from London retailers including department stores Liberty & Co. and Debenham & Freebody), beauty products (face creams, nail polish), and domestic and international travel. This August 1934 number of Harper’s Bazaar demonstrates well Hammill and Smith’s contention that ‘magazines, by circulating fantasies of travel, were instrumental in forging a link between geographical mobility and upward mobility’.166 The issue’s first page presents a photograph of two smartly dressed women striding along a railway platform attended by a uniformed porter, advertising both Dorville ‘chic travel clothes’ and the Southern Railway’s ‘luxurious’ Bournemouth Belle, an ‘all-Pullman express [that] runs daily between London and Bournemouth’.167 Later in the magazine, an advertisement for Canadian Pacific encourages readers to depart on the Empress of Britain, ‘the magnificent 42,500-ton luxury liner’, on a ‘Round the World Cruise’ that is ‘[n]ot only […] of enthralling interest and delight’, but ‘also an eagerly awaited social event’.168 Hammill and Smith link the interwar ‘golden age of the ocean liner, the early development of passenger aviation, and the expansion of tourism by rail’ with the rise of middlebrow culture, and argue that mainstream magazines ‘constructed travel as an opportunity to acquire knowledge and prestige as well as to experience pleasure and luxury’.169 Articles in this Harper’s Bazaar issue repeatedly connect travel with pleasure and prestige. ‘A Land of House Parties this’,

Mediating Modernity  59 asserts Seymour Leslie in ‘Mayfair im Tyrol’, where ‘the chic, the clever, the witty are invited to the wonderful schloss parties during August and September’.170 ‘The Sophisticated still go to Venice’, writes Rosita Forbes in ‘Holiday Hiatus’, ‘where they are sure of being able to feel they are “not as these others” and ‘live exquisitely with the culture of the past and the cooking of the present’.171 High fashion, high society, high art, and luxury travel resonate together across this Harper’s Bazaar issue. While Leslie describes the English socialites who ‘dress and dine for the Opera’ in Salzburg, Mrs. Robin D’Erlanger, herself the wife of an English peer, writes on the success of the Ballet Russes under the direction of Colonel de Basil and their ‘brilliant season at Covent Garden’.172 The magazine evokes and gives the illusion of privileged access to a cosmopolitan elite culture, which the reader is invited to survey from a position of shrewd middlebrow cultural knowledge. Although underpinned by traditional class structures, this cosmopolitan elite was also allied to modernity: it was facilitated by new means of travel, clothed in the latest trends, and widely associated with new attitudes to leisure and pleasure and to sexual and gender relations. ‘Our grandmothers cowered under the taboo “it isn’t done”; and our mothers respected this’, D’Erlanger asserts in ‘All Our To-Days’, a further unsigned article in this Harper’s Bazaar issue, ‘But the only taboo which has the power to move this generation is the dread of being even one minute behind the times!’173 ‘Night clubs were unknown to our mothers’, she continues, ‘restaurants (such few as existed), were regarded as lesser works of the devil’ and ‘could be visited by a “virtuous” woman […] only when she was discreetly clad in a plain black frock, and accompanied by her husband’.174 The greater social freedom experienced by contemporary women without the restraints of chaperonage and the radical potential this freedom suggests for female sexual liberation are also explored by fiction in the magazine. The August 1934 instalment of Waugh’s ‘A Flat in London’, centring on a male protagonist who is unwittingly cuckolded by his wife, satirically begins with the image of ‘men in white ties and tail coats sitting by themselves’ after being ‘abandoned at the last minute by their women’.175 The short story ‘Symphony in Summer’ depicts Ida Farren, a mistress packed off to the countryside by her wealthy lover while he holidays with his wife, and climaxes with her erotic union with a young farmer under the shelter of a tree in thunderstorm. Waugh’s tragi-comic narrative wryly critiques the increased sexual promiscuity associated with the modern period, while the latter story is an escapist romantic fantasy that can only take place away from the strict social codes of the urban middle class. The inclusion of these stories in Harper’s Bazaar serves to convey the magazine’s modernity, though the female sexuality presented within them is not straightforwardly approved.

60  Mediating Modernity D’Erlanger’s ‘All Our To-Days’ playfully concludes that contemporary fashionable society is just as bound by convention as the pre-war era: You must listen when you’re spoken to. You must dance the waltz, and dance it well, knowing how to reverse, too. You must do your best to look well in shorts, though this is a hard one, and eyelashes must never, never be false. In other words, we are just as full of taboos as we ever were, but this year good manners, restraint and poise are the trump cards to play.176 The tensions that play out between radicalism and conventionalism, modernity and nostalgia, and progressive and conservative gender politics across this issue of Harper’s Bazaar are indicative of magazine’s broader interrogation of the modern moment and modern gender roles in the interwar period. Felski reminds us that modernity ‘refers not simply to a substantive range of sociohistorical phenomena—capitalism, bureaucracy, technological development, and so on—but above all to particular (though often contradictory) experiences of temporality and historical consciousness’.177 Early Harper’s Bazaar, in common with interwar Vogue, Good Housekeeping, and Eve, fostered historical consciousness and urged female readers to consider themselves as modern subjects. Modernity is mediated in diverse ways by each of these titles, which approach contemporary social and cultural shifts, trends, upheavals, and the growing freedoms of the present with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation.

Notes 1 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 9–10. 2 Ibid., p. 9. 3 Fiona Hackney, ‘“Women Are News”: British Women’s Magazines 1919– 1939’, in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. by Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 114–33 (p. 114). 4 Felski, p. 61. 5 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 6 On the nineteenth-century department store, see Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping: 1800–1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964). 7 Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan, ‘Introduction: Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion’, in Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion, ed. by Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011), pp. 1–15 (pp. 1–2) (emphasis in original). 8 Felski, pp. 61–2. 9 Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 101. 10 Hackney, p. 116. 11 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 9–10.

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62  Mediating Modernity

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67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77

78

79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period, ed. by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 124–38 (p. 134). These features waxed and waned during the magazine’s decade of publication with some name changes; ‘Eve: Her Books and Music’, for example, became ‘Eve and Her Books’. Editorial, Eve, November 1919, p. 1. I. H. ‘To a Surplus Eve’, Eve, 15 April 1920, p. 189; Marthe Troly-Curtin, ‘Eve and Her Books’, Eve, 27 January 1921, p. 112. Editorial, Eve, February 1920, p. 109. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 122. They explain further: ‘The usual practice was to number the text pages consecutively for an entire volume, anticipating their transformation to a bound book, while the advertising pages were consecutive for single issues only, anticipating their disappearance later’ (p. 122). Editorial subheading, Eve, 25 March 1920, p. 73. Cynthia L. White, Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), p. 94. Ibid. ‘To Our Readers—Old and New’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 2 March 1921, p. 259. I owe the identification of Richard King as a penname of Richard King Huskinson, brother of Edward Huskinson, Eve’s first editor, to the ongoing doctoral research of Claire Going, De Montfort University, into therapeutic short fiction in British periodicals, 1914–28. Vike Martina Plock, ‘“A Journal of the Period”: Modernism and Conservative Modernity in Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial (1919–29)’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period, ed. by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 28–41 (p. 40, n. 2). On Britannia and Eve, see Ilya Parkins, ‘“Eve Goes Synthetic”: Modernising Feminine Beauty, Renegotiating Masculinity in Britannia and Eve’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period, ed. by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 139–52. There is no publisher’s archive for Eve. The archive of Britannia and Eve is owned by the Illustrated London News (ILN) Ltd. and held by the Mary Evans Picture Library, who inform me that Eve is not preserved within the ILN archive. ‘The Girls’ Salon’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, p. 88. Faith Mackenzie, ‘The Unattainable’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, p. 84. Caption from the front cover of Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927. Phyllis H. Satterthwaite, ‘Wimbledon Women in Retrospect’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, p. 80. Hugh Cecil, ‘Mrs. S. S. Hammersley’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, p. 62. ‘Viscountess Folkestone and her daughters’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, p. 55. ‘Getting Married’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, p. 68. ‘Dressed to Match’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, pp. 76–7. ‘Two at a Sitting’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 July 1927, p. 78.

64  Mediating Modernity









































Mediating Modernity  65

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period, ed. by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 210–24. See Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement, 1928–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Notice for ‘Good Housekeeping Employment Bureau’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 180. Advertisements summarized drawn from pp. 180–1. Advertisement from the British Electrical Development Association, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 181. Sir Philip Gibbs, ‘Melody in A Minor’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 10. Editorial caption to Frazier Hunt, ‘A Lonely Little Boy Who Must Be King’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 7. Len Chaloner, ‘The Second Year’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 70. Ibid. ‘Hygienic Table Coverings for the Kitchen’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 44. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ‘An Enamelled Gas Cooker’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 92. Ibid. Advertisement for Deluxe Mainamel Gas Cookers, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, colour insert between pp. 132–3. Giles, p. 117. Kenneth Dalgliesh, ‘£900 builds an Old World Cottage’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 50. The interwar trend for architectural styles recalling England’s heritage was epitomized by the ‘Tudorbethan’ house, ubiquitous in suburban developments in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s; see Deborah Sugg Ryan, The Ideal Home through the 20th Century (London: Hazar, 1997). Light, p. 8. Selected advertisements from Good Housekeeping, May 1930, pp. 95, 119, 181. ‘The Empire Stands for Peace’, advertisement from the Empire Marketing Board, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 177. On the poster campaigns of the EMB see Stephen Constantine, Buy & Build: The Advertising Posters of the Empire Marketing Board (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1986). Winifred Holtby, ‘The Third-Class Adventurer’, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 175. Advertisement for Kotex Sanity Pads, Good Housekeeping, May 1930, p. 108. Ibid. Peterson, p. 206. Ibid., pp. 206–7. Ashley, p. 272. ‘Here Comes Harper’s Bazaar’, advertisement for Harper’s Bazaar in Punch, 2 October 1929, p. xxxv. ‘Note of Warning for Men Only’, advertisement for Harper’s Bazaar on inside front wrapper of Good Housekeeping, May 1930. Ibid.

66  Mediating Modernity 148 J. B. Priestley, signed endorsement printed in Harper’s Bazaar, October 1930, inside front wrapper. 149 Vanity Fair (London: National Magazine Company, 1914–29) was the descendent of the long-running weekly Vanity Fair: A Weekly Show of Political, Social and Literary Wares, founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868 and purchased by the National Magazine Company in 1914. 150 Cole Porter, ‘Dressing Daughter for Dinner’, Harper’s Bazaar, January 1934, p. 5. 151 R. H. Wilenski, ‘The New Sculpture Rediscovers Free Thought’, Harper’s Bazaar, March 1930, p. 70. 152 Quinn, ‘Women’s Magazines – Sales Figures 1938–59’. 153 These words headed Harper’s Bazaar’s ‘Index of Advertisements’ from the first issue in October 1929 into the 1930s. 154 Hammill and Smith, p. 14. 155 Cally Blackman, 100 Years of Fashion Illustration (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2007), p. 10. 156 John Clifford, Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Design (San Francisco, CA: Peachpit Press, 2014), p. 74. 157 Willis Hartshorn, ‘Introduction’, in Man Ray: Bazaar Years, by John Esten (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), pp. 9–16 (p. 13). 158 Ibid. 159 ‘Hotels and Restaurants’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, inside front cover. 160 ‘Lovely Roses, Lovely Ladies’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, pp. 38–9. 161 Harold Nicolson, ‘When Travelling’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 26. 162 ‘A Palace for the Maharajah of Indore’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 59. 163 Sylvia Lynd, ‘Holiday Fiction’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 68. 164 Muriel Cox, ‘Summer into Autumn’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 7. 165 ‘Somewhere-on-Sea’, advertisement for Cartier Ltd., Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 71. 166 Hammill and Smith, p. 1. 167 ‘South for Smartness’, advertisement for Dorville Models and Southern Railway, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 1. 168 Advertisement for Canadian Pacific, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 81. 169 Hammill and Smith, p. 1. 170 Seymour Leslie, ‘Mayfair im Tyrol’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 20. 171 Rosita Forbes, ‘Holiday Hiatus’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 61. 172 Leslie, p. 21; Mrs. Robin D’Erlanger, ‘The Ballet after Diaghilev’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 14. 173 Mrs. Robin D’Erlanger, ‘All Our To-Days’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, p. 63. 174 Ibid. 175 Evelyn Waugh, ‘A Flat in London’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 1934, pp. 16–17. 176 D’Erlanger, ‘All Our To-Days’, p. 96. 177 Felski, p. 9.

2

Modernism in Fashion

Fashion magazines speak persistently of and to the modern. They prize novelty, originality, exclusivity, and innovation, but their supreme authority is good taste. Interwar Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar addressed upwardly mobile consumers aspiring to all-round cultural sophistication and provided guidance on the latest developments in the arts as well as dress. ‘Are you a person avid for the new? Do you like first nights, first editions, fresh foibles?’, asked Vogue’s opening editorial in Late March 1922, ‘If so, the next issue of Vogue […] will be absolutely essential to your happiness’.1 Modernism trended in Vogue and Eve in the 1920s as these magazines kept readers informed of new experiments in art, literature, dance, music, theatre, and cinema. Launched in late 1929, Harper’s Bazaar capitalized on modernism’s established highbrow status in the early 1930s and assumed its readers’ familiarity with and interest in modernist writers, artists, and their works. All three magazines exploited modernism’s high cultural capital, which was closely tied to its perceived complexity and restricted audience, while paradoxically making modernism more accessible to their largely middle-class female readers. ‘“Fashion” refers most simply to ongoing stylistic change in dress’, observe Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan, and is ‘intertwined with many of the changes that have come to define modernity—from the rise of mass production and consumption to the proliferation of popular media and visual culture’.2 Elizabeth Wilson identifies that it was ‘between 1890 and 1910 that the mass production of clothes really took off’.3 Modernism evolved at the same time as mass-produced clothing, celebrity couturiers, and the modern advertising methods of mass-market periodicals combined to make fashion a more visible, attainable, and pervasive influence on society.4 In Modernism à la Mode (2018), Sheehan reminds us that ‘Modernism and la mode spring from the same etymological root: modo, Latin for “just now”’ and that fashion and modernism ‘are entwined conceptually and historically’.5 The last two decades have seen growing interest in fashion within modernist studies. Scholars explore the complex exchange between fashion and modernism within early twentieth-century culture, attending to overlaps in their

68  Modernism in Fashion rhetoric and commercial practices; interactions between modernist art, fashion design, and fashion illustration; and the significance of fashion in the work of modernist writers, particularly women writers such as Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf.6 Some of the earliest work in this area has developed from study of fashion and smart magazines. Nicola Luckhurst, Jane Garrity, Christopher Reed, and Aurelea Mahood, for example, have each examined how modernism was promoted as a fashionable accessory for the aspirational readers of 1920s British Vogue.7 More recently, Faye Hammill and Michele Smith have traced ‘a certain convergence between fashion and modernism’ in mid-twentieth-century Canadian fashion reporting as well as ‘the participation of fashion and fashion journalism in upwardly mobile middlebrow culture’.8 This chapter examines the reception of modernist literature and art alongside and in dialogue with fashion within the pages of three commercial British women’s magazines. My analysis considers how interwar Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar made modernism visible through the lens of fashion, and how the discourse of fashion shaped these magazines’ treatment of contemporary experiments across the arts. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first gives an overview of the routine fashion content of Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar in the interwar period and examines the confluence between modernity, novelty, originality, and sophistication within these elite fashion magazines. The second reads responses to modernism in British Vogue and Eve during 1919–29, contextualizing modernism’s appearance in Dorothy Todd’s mid-1920s Vogue through comparison with a contemporaneous fashion title to uncover the broader trajectory of modernism’s movement into fashion in the early 1920s. The third section turns to modernism’s continued presence in early British Harper’s Bazaar, where the cultural capital associated with aesthetic experimentalism was exploited in the 1930s as the magazine framed knowledge of modernism as a valuable cultural commodity. As a whole, this chapter demonstrates how the elitist logic of fashion shaped responses to modernism within all three magazines, which insisted on modernism’s exclusivity even as they facilitated its entry to the mainstream.

Fashion Magazines, Modernity, and Sophistication Previous scholarly accounts of modernism’s presence in fashion and smart magazines have rightly emphasized these texts’ privileging of modernity and originality. Garrity identifies British ‘Vogue’s strategy of “marketing modernity”’ in the 1920s, while Hammill has shown how ‘Vanity Fair – like modernism itself – continually marketed itself in terms of novelty and making new’.9 Hammill and Smith note that ‘both modernism and fashion seek the new and distinctive whilst continually returning to the past for inspiration’ and highlight ‘the insistent repetition of “new” (and

Modernism in Fashion  69 related words such as “advanced”)’ in fashion reports in the Canadian magazine Chatelaine.10 ‘In critical accounts published from the later nineteenth century onwards’, Hammill and Smith observe, fashion has been theorised as ‘exemplary of the modern’, partly because of its emphasis on change and on the self in process, and partly because of its foregrounding of tensions between individualism and conformity, and between nostalgia and the desire for the new.11 Fashions evolve and advance or recede as they circulate, constantly generating new sartorial rules that project forwards even as they recycle past styles. Writing in 1904, Georg Simmel posited that ‘Fashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future, and consequently conveys a stronger feeling of the present, at least while it is at its height, than most other phenomena’.12 In contrast, Walter Benjamin famously framed fashion’s temporality as cyclical, suggesting that while ‘Fashion has a flair for the topical’, it is also, conversely, ‘a tiger’s leap into the past’.13 Despite its frequent nostalgia, fashion never stands still. ‘Fashion, in a sense is change’, asserts Wilson, for whom fashion can be defined as ‘dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles’.14 Fashion magazines must be up-to-date with, if not ahead of, these changes. They ‘depend upon and compete with the rhythm of fashion’, Sheehan identifies, as they strive to ‘impose on fashion a pace and a mode that can be effectively represented and marketed on the pages of a weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly journal’.15 Seeking to keep up with sartorial trends and to shape them, fashion magazines are preoccupied with the now and the new. During the modernist period, Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar each sought to attract and entertain readers with news of the present and next season’s styles in dress and décor, regular commentary and photographs of recent society events, and reviews of the latest art exhibitions, theatre, dance, books, and music. This ever-shifting spectacle of content appeared in a paradoxically repetitive format. It is not novelty but familiarity that enables women’s magazines to cultivate what Lauren Berlant terms ‘an intimate public’, a bloc of consumers targeted with commodities that seem to ‘express those people’s particular core interests and desires’ and to foster a feeling of commonality between them.16 Magazines rely on serial features, consistent periodical codes, and stable editorial values to build and retain loyal readerships who feel as if each issue speaks directly to their interests and desires even as those interests and desires are subtly moulded by the magazine. Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar each produced a distinctive design and outlook, while devoting the largest portion of their content to dress. Their fashion coverage included reports on the latest trends from Paris and London, lavish illustrations and photographs of couture designs, as well as numerous

70  Modernism in Fashion advertisements for designer and high-street clothes and accessories. Vogue’s serial fashion features in the late 1910s and 1920s included ‘Seen in the Shops’, ‘Vogue’s Fortnightly Wardrobe’, and ‘Vogue Pattern Service’. Eve printed ‘Fashions of To-day and To-morrow’ and ‘Eve in PARadISe’, a light-hearted gossip column providing ‘an amusing potpourri of the very latest fashions from Paris’.17 Harper’s Bazaar had no regular fashion column, but at least a third, and sometimes more than half, of its monthly features were listed under ‘London and Paris Fashions’ (or, alternatively, ‘Paris and London Fashions’) in the magazine’s table of contents during 1929–39. The commercial pages of these periodicals were also packed with attractive images of clothes and accessories that complemented this fashion content and sometimes mimicked its formatting and design in a manner that blurred the division between editorial material and advertisement. Alongside this extensive attention to new styles in dress, each of the three magazines included a book column, theatre reviews, and art criticism among their regular features during the interwar period. Modernism provided a fertile source of content for periodicals engaged in selling novelty – or the illusion of it – whether in relation to fashion, design, or cultural trends. Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar proclaimed their modernity emphatically through their visual content as well as their text. Cally Blackman describes ‘the twenties and thirties [as] the “golden age” of fashion illustration’, during which Condé Nast, ‘keen to promote all that was new in art’, was inspired by the beautiful hand-coloured fashion plates of Lucien Vogel’s luxury La Gazette du Bon Ton (1912–25) ‘to invest heavily in illustration within the pages of Vogue’.18 Many of Gazette du Bon Ton’s artists went on to work for Vogue and other fashion papers, including Georges Lepape, who ‘did more than 100 covers for Vogue’, while Charles Martin illustrated for Vogue and Eve and Etienne Drian’s artwork appeared in Eve and Harper’s Bazaar.19 The cover designs of early British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and much of their internal fashion artwork were drawn from the American editions in this period. Harper’s Bazaar ‘signed an exclusive contract with Erté’, formerly a designer for leading French couturier Paul Poirot, ‘which lasted from 1915 to 1938’, during which Erté produced over 200 art deco covers for the magazine (see, for example, Figure 1.5).20 The elongated bodies, flattened forms, and striking use of contrast, line, and geometrics that came to characterize even routine fashion sketches in Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar during the 1920s and 1930s showed the influence of contemporary experimental movements in art (see Figure 2.1). Moving into the 1930s, the increasing use of photography in place of artwork within Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and, particularly, the colour photographs on their covers as the decade progressed, likewise conveyed these magazines’ modernity. ‘Nast led the way in the shift from hand-drawn illustrations to photography’, as Paul Martineau details, almost doubling his

Modernism in Fashion  71

Figure 2.1 Fashion plate, Vogue, Early May 1924.

budget for photography between 1930 and 1932 ‘while his budget for art dropped by roughly one third’.21 ‘Inspired by trends in modern art and design such as Cubism, Constructivism, and the Art Deco movement’, Edward Steichen – employed by Vogue from 1923 to 1938 – established a new ‘brand of modern fashion photography, which was characterized by its forthright approach’ and ‘refined aesthetic’ in contrast to the earlier

72  Modernism in Fashion trend for ‘romantic, pictorial fashion photographs’.22 One of Steichen’s most notable disciples, George Hoyningen-Huene, worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s. 23 In 1934, Alexey Brodovitch was hired as Harper’s Bazaar’s new art director by Carmel Snow, recently appointed Editor-in-Chief, and together they set about modernizing the look of magazine in ways that reflected his enthusiasm for European avant-garde aesthetics and their shared conviction that ‘photography could be aesthetically and commercially exciting’. 24 Brodovitch’s integrated layouts experimented with cropped photographs, white space, and the setting of text at angles or in shapes, and ‘considered these elements not only on each individual page, but also as they flowed and harmonized from spread to spread’.25 In the mid-1930s, he oversaw the production of surrealist fashion photographs and cover art. Allusions to modernism in the text and visual rhetoric of Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar in the interwar years should be understood through the elitist logic of fashion. Simmel identified fashion itself as ‘a product of class distinction’. 26 Whether in relation to dress, behaviour, or aesthetic judgement, he contended, fashion ‘affects only the upper classes’, who set the trends that unite and distinguish their social group: Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on. 27 For Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction, taste is also a product and producer of class hierarchies. ‘It functions as a sort of social orientation, a “sense of one’s place”’, Bourdieu claims, ‘guiding the occupants of a given place in social space […] towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position’. 28 Commercial fashion magazines often obscure the capitalist economics of taste – ironically, to promote their sales – by propagating the notion that information gained through reading them, rather than wealth, is the key to achieving a perfect wardrobe and a discriminating eye. ‘Good taste is not a question of money’, asserted Edna Woolman Chase, Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief, in the British edition in June 1927, ‘it is a question of knowledge and the time spent in acquiring it’. 29 Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar, in common with other sophisticated fashion and smart magazines of this period, sought to guide their readers to good taste whether in relation to dress, design, etiquette, theatre, art, or literature. They appealed to readers who were able, or who desired, to talk knowledgeably on all aspects of high culture, and participated in fashioning modernism into a desirable, high-end cultural product. Modernism’s perceived exclusivity as much as its novelty and originality made it attractive to fashion magazines keen to educate and flatter

Modernism in Fashion  73 their readers into a community of sophisticated cultural observers. Hammill has identified the chief characteristic of sophistication, a highly malleable and often purposefully mystified concept, as the assumption that it ‘can only be recognised by someone who already possesses it’, and yet, ‘at the same time, and paradoxically, such a person would usually be imagined as educated, culturally aware, fashionable and self-conscious, and all of these things require deliberate effort’. 30 For Hammill, ‘smart’ magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker supply ‘prime examples’ of texts that make this tension visible by ‘propos[ing] that sophistication is the property of a distinguished elite, and yet covertly offer[ing] an education in sophistication’.31 Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar can also be profitably interpreted in this mould. These elite fashion periodicals supplied their readers with knowledge as much as novelty, offering guidance on what to wear and how to wear it, where to travel and when to go there, which books to read, shows to see, and exhibitions to visit, and, crucially, where to be seen. Eve pledged to ‘interest, amuse, perhaps even instruct you, dear friends and readers’ as it moved to weekly publication in March 1920.32 The Early April 1924 issue of Vogue reminded readers that only the ‘well-trained, Vogue-trained, eye’ can recognize immediately why last year’s frock ‘is démodé upon at least ten counts’ and distinguish ‘the dress of this season’.33 ‘Fashions change and Harper’s Bazaar forecasts every change’, an advertisement for the magazine’s subscription service assured readers in September 1931.34 Across the interwar years, each of these magazines strove to attract and cultivate a sophisticated audience by providing exclusive access to designer fashions, the aristocracy, high art, and celebrity culture. The arts and cultural content of these three periodicals provide valuable insights into changing attitudes to modernist work during this period. While glossy fashion magazines like Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar allowed new and wider audiences access to modernism, they did not necessarily facilitate the reception of modernism as user-friendly. Indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, modernism’s difficulty, strangeness, and exclusivity were as important as its modernity to the sophisticated publics of Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar. Following the elitist logic of fashion, these magazines desired distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, good taste and bad taste, extraordinary and ordinary, even as they continually revised and troubled the meaning of those categories.

Trending Modernism in Vogue and Eve, 1919–29 The following section explores the reception and dissemination of modernism in early British Vogue and Eve. It focuses on the years of Eve’s publication, 1919–29, during which modernism became fashionable in both magazines. However, it should be noted that Vogue showed awareness of modernism before this time. Indeed, in its infancy in July 1916,

74  Modernism in Fashion British Vogue included a signed article by Ananda Coomaraswamy on the Hindu art of Rajput painting and ‘Its Artistic Sisterhood to “Modernist” Art’, which argues that new movements in European painting have created new audiences for non-representational art forms that were previously ‘regarded as merely curious or barbaric’.35 A renowned art critic, Coomaraswamy identifies a growing public of sophisticated art lovers who are sympathetic to the aims of expressionist and abstract art and, therefore, more receptive to non-European styles of painting often dismissed from an imperialist perspective as primitive and strange. This essay was one of a handful of articles by highbrow writers in early British Vogue drawn from the American edition’s sister publication, Vanity Fair.36 On the whole, discussion of modernism in early British Vogue was rare though references to modernist art, music, and dance did occasionally appear in the magazine’s fashion and fine arts content. In Late May 1917, for example, a column on decorative furnishings on sale at an unnamed shop near Mayfair instructed Vogue’s readers on the latest trends for ‘the Modern Home’.37 Images of lampshades, candlesticks, and ‘Futurism […] applied to rugs’ accompanied text explaining that ‘[c]lear colours, simple designs, and fine, durable materials, mostly hand woven and hand wrought, are the essentials of this scheme of materializing, and offering to the public the principles of the new movements in Art’.38 When the word ‘futurist’ is applied to ‘an odd little hat’ of blue serge with an embroidered geometric pattern in the fashion column ‘Vogue Points’ in Early August 1917, however, it is unclear whether futurism is understood as a specific artistic movement or simply used to indicate design that is perceived as modern and different. 39 Other more informed discussions of modernist aesthetics in early British Vogue include two further signed essays: Jean Cocteau’s account of his ‘“Parade”: Ballet Réaliste’ (Early October 1917), another feature drawn from Vanity Fair; and Roger Fry’s ‘A Possible Domestic Architecture’ (Late March 1918), a discussion of his modernist principles of design. An editorial caption before Cocteau’s illustrated article emphasizes the controversy, ‘not to say fury’, that was aroused by the first production of Parade by the Ballet Russes at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris in May 1917, and introduces its composer, Erik Satie, as ‘the leader of the futurist musicians in Paris’, and its designer, Pablo Picasso, as ‘leader of the cubist school of painting in Europe’.40 Vogue’s early responses to modernism emphasize its modernity, its potential to shock or disrupt, and serve to display the magazine’s superior cultural knowledge in keeping abreast of developments in the artistic avant-garde. Eve similarly signalled its contact with high culture and modern artistic trends from the outset with an article on ‘The Russian Ballet’ by A. E. Johnson in the magazine’s first issue in November 1919. Johnson’s essay welcomes the return of the Ballet Russes to London, while providing an abridged survey of the company’s past productions and leading dancers.

Modernism in Fashion  75 ‘The outstanding thing about the Russians […] is their abounding vitality’, Johnson asserts: What troupe, suddenly taking the town by storm, as they did in the years before the war, could be expected to dispense with a Fokine, a Bakst, a Nijinsky, and a Bolm, and yet produce, inexhaustibly, new delights which almost cause us to forget the old?41 Johnson’s repeated use of the collective pronoun ‘us’ draws the reader into his circle of the elite public who patronize and appreciate the ballet, or, at least, who know of the furore when ‘Paris hooted’ at the first production of Le Sacre du Printemps in May 1913.42 His article assumes and imparts knowledge of the company’s history, increasing his readers’ cultural sophistication, while also celebrating the creativity of the contemporary Ballet Russes: There is no stagnation here […]. They for ever itch to be at something fresh, and with the restless ferment of the true artist, they are perpetually breaking out in new places. Nothing gives them pause; and even when audacity o’erleaps itself, their élan startles the spectator (at least, for the moment) out of all his critical faculties.43 This privileging of originality and innovation was a key refrain across the arts, fashion, and commercial pages of Eve, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar in the modernist period, whether discussing the pursuit of ‘individuality in dress’, advertising ‘Distinctly Original and Chic Gowns’, reporting the ‘new winter colours’, or reviewing contemporary dance, music, literature, and painting.44 Johnson acknowledges the potential challenge presented by such avant-garde work when ‘audacity o’erleaps itself’, an image than brings together the physical leap of the dancer and the intellectual and aesthetic leaps of the experimental artist with a hint of Daedalus’s warning to Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. His description of the spectator of the Ballets Russes startled out of their critical faculties parallels other depictions of modernism as strange and bewildering, but this experience is not portrayed as unwelcome. Meanwhile, the use of the word ‘élan’, evoking Henri Bergson’s influential notion of élan vital, a vital force that guides human creativity according to Bergson in Creative Evolution (1907), implies the reader is familiar with contemporary artistic and intellectual discourse and, if they are not, helpfully expands their vocabulary in that direction. Prior to 1923, commentary on modernism in British Vogue was largely restricted to the magazine’s art criticism. The magazine included a regular unsigned art review of new exhibitions, overwhelmingly from London galleries in this early period and predominantly showcasing work from preceding eras or contemporary art that was representational in style.45

76  Modernism in Fashion When modernist experiments in painting and sculpture were evoked or reviewed by British Vogue’s art column during this period, it was usually with suspicion or scorn. A review of ‘Paintings by Gerald L. Brockhurst’ in Late April 1919, for example, was joyfully subtitled: ‘Pictures at the Chenil Gallery. The Influence of Cubists Resisted’.46 The review begins with a lengthy discussion of the contemporary state of British art that celebrates the work of a ‘brilliant’ group of established, older painters – ‘P. Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Orpen, and Ambrose McEvoy’ – while bemoaning that most of the next generation ‘seem to have lost their way, or to have enmeshed their genius in fantastic theory’ under the influence of continental experimental movements.47 This review is indicative of the typical criticisms of modernism in Vogue’s art column before 1923, which frequently held that modernist art was too theoretical or over-sophisticated – surrounded by a pretentious mystique propagated by a small coterie of artists and their followers (characterized as mostly foreign in origin and/or bohemian in outlook) – and that it was also, conversely, simplistic, formulaic, and dull, a crude artistic method adopted by those wishing to disguise a lack of talent. ‘In cubism, and theories allied to it’, the anonymous reviewer of Brockhurst contends, ‘we get the most paralysing form of conventionalism, conventions not arrived at by the artist through discipline of his practice, but adopted ready-made’.48 The phrase ‘ready-made’ recalls Marcel Duchamp’s whimsical transformation of found objects into art, such as his Dadaist presentation of a urinal as a Fountain (1917), but the reviewer does not seem to have had this allusion in mind. In the context of Vogue, this term evokes the mass manufacture of garments according to a standardized pattern, the technical evolution in the production of clothes that made fashion no longer the preserve of the upper classes. The reviewer aligns contemporary experimental art with mass-produced, ready-made clothing, a lesser-quality product created through slavish adherence to a template or ‘recipe’, while the ‘true artist lives alone in the world’ much like the individual celebrity designers of haute couture.49 In contrast to his contemporaries, Brockhurst ‘has been saved from current sophistry and cant’ because of his personality and originality – ‘because he had something he really wanted to say’ – and because he has followed the old masters (rather than the new) and turned to nature for inspiration. 50 His figurative paintings are admired, while modernist art is criticized for a perceived lack of skilled draughtsmanship: ‘Some have availed themselves of geometrical shapes in their pictures to conceal their absence of knowledge of natural form’.51 Dismissing modernism as mediocre was a common way of dealing its difficulty at this time. Such criticisms of modernist art in Vogue’s early art reviews reflect broader attitudes towards modernism in the period. Leonard Diepeveen has traced the reception of literary modernism – specifically, modernist difficulty – across a range of contemporary books, essays, reviews, and

Modernism in Fashion  77 little magazines, noting that for conservative observers ‘what was coming to be known as “modernist” literature and its difficulty opposed great art’ and ‘was the product (1) of a clearly defined school, (2) of deliberate strategies, and (3) of weak writers’.52 Modernism’s detractors ‘believed that difficult writers were not honest and lonely artists, creating splendid, pure works of self-expression’, Diepeveen explains, but ‘part of a movement’ that ‘set out to make difficult art’.53 This belief was propelled by practitioners and promoters of modernism, from T. S. Eliot to F. R. Leavis, who wrote about difficulty and made it central to the establishment of the modern canon.54 Although the focus of Diepeveen’s study is literature, his observations about conservative responses to modernist writing equally apply to Vogue’s early commentary on modernist art. Reviewing a recent exhibition of modern French painting at the Mansard Gallery in Early September 1919, Vogue’s art critic articulates the belief that modernism was the product of a coherent school by arguing that English opposition to modernist art – here termed ‘post-impressionism’ – is ‘not to the movement itself, but to the interpretation of life which some of its exponents from abroad try to force upon us in their paintings’.55 The reviewer argues that Derain, Matisse, Modigliani, and Picasso, among others, neglect beauty and instead ‘seem to like to ally themselves with what in life is drab’.56 A further Vogue art review from Late August 1920 contends that the female subject of one of Matisse’s portraits showing at the Goupil Gallery ‘has no more individuality than have those charming creatures who tempt us in the summer sale catalogues with seductive hats and bathing gear’.57 ‘It will not do for M. Matisse’s friends to rejoin: “Ah, but he was out to express the fundamental rhythmic unity of the plastic absolute”’, the review objects, ‘Because even if he was […] the evident result is quite insignificant compared with the living quality he has missed’ and ‘his “fundamental rhythm” is as barren a mannerism as that of the mere fashion artist’.58 These disparaging comments towards modernist painting demonstrate the perception that modernism was the product of deliberately dry, formalist strategies and satirize the complex jargon that modernist artists and their supporters were believed to rely on to defend this inferior work. The word ‘rhythm’ was widely applied to early modernism, for example, as Faith Binckes has documented in her study of the little magazine of that name in print from 1911 to 1913: Frances Spalding suggested ‘“Rhythm” denoted modernity at this time’, Binckes observes, Ezra Pound ‘in 1912 claimed “rhythm” as the hallmark of the true poet’, and art critic Frank Rutter later recalled that ‘RHYTHM was the magic word of the moment. […] When we liked the design in a painting or drawing, we said it had Rhythm’.59 Vogue’s art critic dismisses as empty posturing the use of such language to explain Matisse’s painting and other contemporary artistic experiments. The reviewer’s derisive comparison between Matisse’s fauvist portrait and fashion drawing might

78  Modernism in Fashion seem surprising in Vogue – in which illustrations of contemporary fashions featured prominently in editorial and commercial content – but notably it is images from ‘the summer sale catalogues’ rather than Vogue’s exclusive reports of cutting-edge couture designs that are aligned with Matisse’s painting.60 Diepeveen observes that for modernism’s sceptics ‘difficulty was fashionable’, ‘an inconsequential and passing shift in literary taste’.61 This assertion also applies to the treatment of modernist art in early British Vogue, but here, as in other fashion magazines, fashionability is a more nuanced concept. As Sheehan describes, the fashion magazine’s project ‘does not amount simply to a celebration of “the latest thing”’ but rather requires constant evaluation to distinguish between the ‘idiosyncratic’ and the ‘fashionable’.62 ‘Both Vogue and Eve established their authority and their business model’, Sheehan writes, ‘in part by taking up a pose of scepticism and irony towards fashion’s novelties and vagaries’.63 Vogue’s early art reviews position modernist painting as a passing fad rather than a meaningful trend, an idiosyncratic novelty with which the sophisticated readers of Vogue are familiar but which they will not follow blindly without scrutiny or criticism. ‘“Modernists’” shows fall thick as autumn leaves’, declared a Vogue article addressed to gallery-goers in Early January 1920, ‘and who knows when he may be find himself standing, unprepared, before Another New Genius’.64 During early 1920, Vogue’s art reviews included commentary on exhibitions by the New English Art Club (Early February 1920), a comparison of the treatment of the nude by Auguste Renoir and Amedeo Modigliani (Late February 1920), recent sculpture by Jacob Epstein at the Leicester Galleries (Early March 1920), a review of impressionism (Late March 1920), and a discussion of the Women’s International Art Club at the Grafton Galleries (Late April 1920). In ‘Shining at a Private View’, Vogue advised its readers on ‘The Art of Appearing at Ease Before the Puzzling Masterpieces of the Moderns’.65 Accompanied by a fullpage illustration by FISH of well-dressed spectators in varying degrees of bemusement circulating through a gallery of simplified painted and sculpted female nudes, this article humorously teaches what Bourdieu terms ‘strategies of bluff’, through which the accomplished socialite uses ‘the vague knowledge given by familiarity’ to give an inflated impression of their cultural competence.66 Its anonymous author supplies a series of stock responses for use when ‘confronted by the latest canvases of the latest “Post” painter’, ranging from ‘What rhythmic movement! What restrained line!’ to ‘How naïve? How archaic’, or, conversely, ‘How complex! How futuresque!’67 ‘A good general rule is to limit oneself to exclamations in terms which refer to another art or to anything rather than painting’, the article advises: Literary allusions are generally liked; so many people read. For instance, a beautiful, bewildering little canvas need not find one at

Modernism in Fashion  79 a loss. Seize the moment to exclaim ‘How truly Meredithian!’ or ‘What a superb Conrad!’68 ‘One clever woman, famous for her repertoire of gallery comment, when faced by a very extreme picture, permits herself a breathless “How very brave!”’, the article satirically concludes, ‘But comment of this delicate nature should be attempted only after long practice’.69 This wry discussion presents an implied critique of contemporary experimental art that flummoxes the viewer. Although the word ‘masterpiece’ is applied, it is clearly ironic given the author’s assertion that ‘“naïveté” and “simplicity are […] the most jealously regarded characteristics of every Modernist’ as these ‘[p]ainters and sculptors struggle for precedence in Infantile Visions’.70 The voice of the article, and the readers it speaks to, are situated apart from both the modernist artist and the uninformed spectator, here designated ‘the Uninitiated Innocent’ or ‘Uninstructed’.71 Regarding the first as charlatans hiding behind over-sophisticated postures of genius and the latter as unsophisticated in their bewilderment when faced with experimental art, the writer and Vogue’s readers are positioned instead as just sophisticated enough to recognize the humour in this modern scenario and to bluff their way through it equipped with the appropriate knowledge and language to respond. In the early 1920s, both Vogue and Eve position art and the spaces in which it is shown as a backdrop against which the intellectual and social elite can socialize and themselves be seen. On 7 December 1921, Eve printed a full-page sketch by FISH titled ‘The Private View’, which neatly parallels her illustrations for Vogue’s ‘Shining at a Private View’.72 In the Eve cartoon, a crowd of men in suits and top hats and women in evening dress and furs stand talking in groups before a wall of paintings. The spectators in the foreground draw the eye far more than the figures watching over them from the framed portraits above, suggesting that it is high society and their fashions that are on display here as much as the paintings they have ostensibly come to see. On 30 January 1924, Eve’s central colour photogravure supplement presented illustrations by André Pécoud of fashions worn ‘at the varnishing party given in Paris at the home of the famous artist, Van Dongen’.73 A studio ‘varnishing party’, like the gallery’s ‘Private View’, evokes an exclusive high cultural space to which one might only be admitted by invitation. The centrefold, titled ‘Fashion’s Art in an Artist’s Studio’, depicts three groups of glamourous spectators with captions detailing their attire, from a ‘“middle-aged” gown […] in grey velvet, tulle and crêpe de Chine’ to a full-skirted dress ‘in shot green taffetas embroidered in primrose-coloured roses’.74 In contrast, the paintings of Dutch-French fauvist Kees Van Dongen remain either out of focus or out of view in Pécoud’s illustrations. This feature reflects the broader framing of fashion as art in Eve and Vogue, in common with other high-end fashion magazines of the period, as well as the

80  Modernism in Fashion way in which the art exhibition itself is constructed as a site of cultural sophistication offering the gallery-goer the possibility of entry into a social and intellectual elite. A photo-spread in May 1922 merged the format of an art review with a society gossip feature to depict ‘Society at the Private View of the Royal Academy’ with the caption ‘Were you there?’75 Eve had no regular art column in the 1920s, though the magazine did include occasional features on recent exhibitions and profiles of artists or their works. A large image of Epstein’s sculpture of The Risen Christ (1917–19) was reproduced in the 15 April 1920 issue, for example, with a caption declaring it ‘the most discussed piece of statuary in the world to-day’.76 Eve responds to the controversy surrounding the morality of Epstein’s depiction of an emaciated, suffering, yet defiant and reproving Christ rather than its aesthetics, voicing contemporary anti-Semitic debate regarding whether the sculpture was made ‘in a sincere spirit of reverence’ or ‘in the anti-Christian, Bolshevistic spirit, as manifested among certain sections of the Jews to-day’.77 Eve’s coverage of art usually took the form of captioned images rather than full reviews. It often shows a preference for figurative art worked according to established styles, such as a feature on the Royal Academy exhibition at Burlington House in 18 May 1921 reproducing pictures by G. Spencer Watson, Ernest Board, Henry Lamb, and W. Strang and identifies the latter’s ‘best work’ as that which is ‘decorative in aim’ and ‘pre-Raphaelite in treatment’.78 ‘Art among the Moderns’ printed in Eve on 5 October 1921, in contrast, reproduced four images of paintings showing at an exhibition of C. R. W. Nevinson’s work at the Leicester Galleries, pronouncing him ‘[o]ne of the most discussed painters in Europe and America’ and ‘an acknowledged pioneer and leader of that development of realism in modern art called “Modernism”’.79 However, the feature conveys very little understanding of either ‘Modernism’ or Nevinson’s experiments with a range of different modern styles. There is no attempt to acknowledge or engage with the variety of approaches and mediums represented by the four images selected here, and the only direct commentary on these images – ­­ exrelating to Nevinson’s impressionist etching, The Connoisseur – is ceedingly vague, simply asking the reader to note the ‘careful modelling of the figure and the broadness of treatment’.80 Yet Eve, like Vogue, undoubtedly expected its readers to be aware of modernist aesthetic movements. In May 1923, the magazine published ‘The Super-Futurist’, a short story ridiculing contemporary abstract art by the German-Jewish writer Alexander Moszkowski, originally published in German as ‘Siehst du so aus?!’ in Moszkowski’s book of satire, Die Ehe im Rückfall und andere Anzüglichkeiten (1917). ‘The Super-Futurist’ assumes knowledge of the negative stereotypes surrounding modernist artists and plays on the notion, described by Diepeveen, that ‘modern difficulty was the product of a technique, a stunt, a formal game, and because it was easy, it had no aesthetic value’.81

Modernism in Fashion  81 Moszkowski’s humorous tale depicts an artist named Gabriel Flex visited by a fairy who changes his appearance to match a self-portrait he has just completed ‘in that extraordinary super-futurist style which so self-sacrificingly resists all temptations to a likeness, and, instead, gives us an incredible mixture of buffoonery and horror; a dehumanising of the human being’.82 After a series of amusing mishaps due to his altered appearance culminating in him escaping imprisonment, Gabriel is transformed back again and decides ‘to tackle his future afresh’ by becoming ‘what he should have been from the very beginning, a house painter’.83 This spoof fairy tale exposes the modern artist as ‘an idiot’ whose determinedly radical style of painting hides his lack of artistic skill.84 The story’s censure of modernist experimentalism extends beyond the comic character of Gabriel to modern movements in art more widely with the inclusion of ‘an Art Journal’ hailing Gabriel ‘the king of Neo-Inexpressibilism’, a parodic reference to German expressionism, which, combined with the references to futurism (including the hyperbolic ‘super-futurist’ in the title of the English translation), suggests a broader critique of the abundance of ‘-isms’ associated with contemporary radical European artistic styles and groupings.85 The publication of Moszkowski’s satire in Eve reflects the editor’s assumption that the magazine’s readers would be familiar enough with these modern movements to appreciate the story’s humour and that they would likely retain a healthy suspicion of modernist art. Commentary on modernist literature in Vogue and Eve during the late 1910s and early 1920s was sparse. Literature as a whole commanded relatively little attention in Vogue and Eve in this early period. Before 1923, Vogue’s unsigned book column, ‘Turning Over New Leaves’, was often relegated to the magazine’s back pages where it appeared among advertisements and sometimes filled no more than half a page. ‘Eve and her Books’, Eve’s first serial books feature, was printed sporadically rather than in every issue. Nevertheless, Jane Ramsay Kerr’s article ‘As the Novelists See Us’, printed in Eve in April 1920, briefly referred to ‘Dorothy Richardson’s odd series’ as exemplary of the ‘good work’ by contemporary writers that is ‘experimental and original in form’.86 While implicitly acknowledging the challenge that such ‘odd’ new writing can present, Kerr defends it with the assertion that ‘it is alive’.87 When Vogue’s book column turned to Richardson’s Deadlock (1921) in March 1921, the anonymous reviewer was rather more scathing. This sixth novel in Richardson’s Pilgrimage series – here branded ‘the neverso-far-as-one-can-see-to-be-concluded history of Miriam Henderson’ – is commended for its convincing characterization and ‘remarkably keen’ powers of observation, but condemned for its ‘impracticable method’.88 The reviewer complains that ‘one tires or grows impatient’ of the novel’s lengthy stretches of interior monologue.89 Richardson’s narrative technique is described as ‘a fascinating game’, another example of the

82  Modernism in Fashion commonplace critique that modernist experiment was the product of idle play rather than serious intellectual labour. This perception is consolidated when the reviewer objects to Richardson’s style by alluding to the moral of Aesop’s fable of ‘The Boys and the Frogs’ with the humorous statement that ‘what is sport for you is death—or at any rate dizziness— for us’.90 This Vogue review disparages Richardson’s experimentalism where Kerr’s Eve essay applauded it, but both responses emphasize the strangeness of modernist literature and the bewilderment it provokes. As modernist writers began to attract attention in Eve and Vogue in the early 1920s, their strange style came under increasing scrutiny. In May 1922, a review of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories in Vogue reflects on both the surprising popularity of Mansfield’s short fiction and her ‘delicate and elusive’ art, which ‘make[s] a story out of nothing’ and ‘might be expected to appeal most to those who are interested in technique’.91 Vogue’s reviewer voices the common contemporary criticism of modernism that it is a technical exercise prioritizing style over substance, comparing her literary experimentalism with the impressionist painting of Claude Monet, ‘who, beautiful painter as he was, was so absorbed in his method that he treated subject as of no importance’.92 ‘There are stories in Miss Mansfield’s books of which the subjects are so slight and commonplace that they were hardly worth the trouble expended on them’, the anonymous reviewer contends, before concluding that ‘[w]hen, however, she has a subject worth treating, she makes of it something uniquely exquisite’ by giving ‘at once and indivisibly, the inside and the outside of people and things; so that the texture of her work is deep and translucent, solid and full of colour’.93 Reviewing Mansfield’s The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories in Eve in 1923 following her death, Colin Gray praised her ‘very extraordinary and very remarkable stories’.94 Like Vogue’s reviewer, Gray considers the challenging style of Mansfield’s short fiction and emphasizes her lack of plot development: The common way with stories is to rouse your curiosity and then satisfy it. Katherine Mansfield always arouses your curiosity, but never satisfies it […]. She puts you “just there,” shows you what there is, and leaves you with the impression or the emotion that the case arouses. The strong point is that you are always interested or moved.95 When D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod was discussed in Vogue in Early September 1922, the reviewer similarly drew attention to features by now commonly associated with experimental modern literature: novelty, interiority, and difficulty. The reviewer contends the novel ‘has no plot’ and that Lawrence concentrates ‘on the inward and spiritual things’, which ‘will certainly cause some readers of Aaron’s Rod to stumble and

Modernism in Fashion  83 be bewildered’.96 ‘That snug, well-ordered literary world with which a thousand novels have made us familiar is not the world of Aaron’s Rod’, Vogue’s readers are warned, and ‘[t]hose who like to tread again its wellworn paths should avoid this book’.97 Interestingly, the subject matter of Lawrence’s novel receives no discussion, just as the subject matter of Mansfield’s stories is talked around without any explicit examples in the Vogue and Eve reviews above. This omission is striking given that both ‘Turning Over New Leaves’ in Vogue and Colin Gray’s ‘A Quiet Corner’ for Eve routinely sketched out the plot or the content of the books they reviewed. Mansfield’s and Lawrence’s fiction is described in the abstract with reference to stylistic features commonly associated with modernism, but all three reviews are ultimately favourable. The Vogue review of Lawrence’s novel suggests his writing will be ‘of absorbing interest’ to a restricted audience receptive to the interiority of modern fiction: ‘those who would explore strange, little-visited corners of the human soul’.98 In contrast, Vogue’s reviewer expresses surprise at the popularity of Mansfield’s short fiction among not only critics but also ‘the great Mudie public’ given the unconventional nature of her style.99 Todd’s appointment as editor of Vogue in 1922 led to a rapid change in direction in this magazine’s treatment of modernism. Under Todd not only did the volume of commentary on modernism in Vogue significantly increase and the range of experimental works surveyed expand, but this commentary also moved from sophisticated detachment – a position hitherto largely shared with Eve – to detailed engagement with and frequently overt embracing of experimentalism across the arts. Chase later recalled rather regretfully that as Todd ‘became at home in that coterie of English intellectuals and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group’ in London in the early 1920s, taking to ‘this supercivilized, exotic, somewhat self-conscious milieu like a duck to water’, ‘many distinguished members of “Bloomsbury” appeared in British Vogue’.100 The impact of this change in personnel is evident in the dramatic shift in the magazine’s responses to modernist art. As Luckhurst notes, ‘[t]he conservative taste which had previously informed Vogue’s art reviews was now vilified by their regular critic, Clive Bell’, who began contributing to Vogue in 1923 and was published there until 1927.101 Todd, Bell, and other writers of Vogue’s fine arts column, notably the critic Raymond Mortimer, embarked on a campaign of promoting Bloomsbury artists and critics in the magazine that will be explored in more detail in Chapter 4. An unsigned review in Late April 1923, for example, likely authored by Bell, heralded Roger Fry ‘the most far-sighted, courageous and intelligent critic alive, or, indeed imaginable’, with reference to the importance of the first and second Post-Impressionist Exhibitions and his foundation of the Omega workshops.102 During the first six months of 1923, Vogue included admiring reviews of a range of ‘English artists of marked individuality’, including Duncan Grant, Frank Dobson, Edward Wadsworth,

84  Modernism in Fashion and Wyndham Lewis.103 Between 1922 and 1927, Vogue’s art criticism favoured experimental painting and sculpture with occasional reports of exhibitions in Paris as well as London. While Fry and other Bloomsbury artists often received inflated praise, not all modernist experiments were welcomed. In ‘Paris Again. What Next?’ (Early July 1925), for example, Bell wrote scathingly of ‘Surréalisme’ in literature and painting in terms that recall the complaints of modernism’s detractors: ‘its doctrines, like most, are fantastic; and, like most little schools, it may be presumed to consist of one or two men of talent, who will eventually take their places in the tradition, and a cloud of pushing nincompoops’.104 Even such negative responses to modernism during Todd’s tenure differ from Vogue’s earlier art criticism and the patchy arts coverage of Eve, however, in being both passionate and well-informed. ‘Chagal [sic.], who came from Russia via Berlin, has some talent’, Bell reflects in this wide-ranging review essay, before instructing readers that ‘works by painters of the new mystic school are generally to be found (they are not always hanging) in the Galerie Simon (rue d’Astorg)’.105 Vogue’s commentary on modernist art prior to Todd’s arrival – and much of Eve’s commentary on modernism throughout the 1920s – was reliant on strategies of bluff. After Todd’s establishment as editor, her employment of experimental artists, writers, and their allies from Bloomsbury and beyond as contributors produced much more knowledgeable and nuanced discussion of modernism in the magazine. British Vogue under Todd overtly teaches readers about modernism in a manner that accords with Daniel Tracy’s understanding of middlebrow culture as educative: the magazine can be interpreted alongside contemporary US smart magazines Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as part of ‘the increasing number of apparatuses for learning “high culture”’ that ‘used the productive capacities of mass culture to capitalize on the new and growing obsession with cultural legitimacy’ in this era.106 In Early November 1923, Vogue printed an informative introduction to ‘The Modern Movement in Art’ by ‘R.M.’ (almost certainly Raymond Mortimer) addressed to those who are ‘in their hearts quite at sea about the aims which inspire contemporary artists’.107 The article tackles ‘a confusion of terms which needs clearing up’ by illuminating the meaning of ‘“Futurist,” “Cubist,” “Post-Impressionist,” “Bolshevist”’ in a tone that assumes the reader is sophisticated enough to avoid ‘using these words indiscriminately’ while providing the instruction necessary to prevent such a faux pas.108 ‘The Futurists were some Italian gentlemen who thought pictures ought to express all the sensations of modern life’, the article explains dismissively; ‘they painted worthless pictures intended to represent the feelings of a person on a railway journey or in a restaurant, and they professed a violent hatred for all the art produced in the past’.109 ‘Cubism was a movement inaugurated by Picasso and Braque’ that ‘seems more or less spent’ in which a ‘picture contains

Modernism in Fashion  85 little representation of natural objects and, like architecture, depends for its interest upon the relations of lines and planes’.110 ‘“Bolshevist”’, Vogue’s readers are informed, is ‘merely used as a term of abuse’ and the art to which it refers ‘has nothing to with Trotsky, and did not originate in Russia’.111 In contrast, ‘Post-Impressionist is a term invented by Mr. Roger Fry’ that ‘denotes the school of painting which came after the Impressionist School […], the painters influenced by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Gaugin’.112 ‘The first thing to realise about these painters is that they are not trying to produce imitations of Nature’, the article helpfully elucidates: If Matisse paints trees, he does not aim at making a coloured photograph of trees […]. He is creating a thing beautiful in itself, a picture which satisfies the eye by its lines and colours, and the harmony between them, a picture which is comparable to a piece of music rather than a photograph or an illustration.113 An image of Matisse’s L’Etang de Trivaux (1916–17) serves to illustrate the argument. ‘Pictures are like everything else that is worth while [sic.]’, Mortimer asserts, ‘from hats and food to persons and places: only affectionate study enables one to appreciate them properly’.114 A list of exhibitions of modern art in London encourages the reader to attend and embrace its ‘growing popularity among persons of taste to-day’.115 The article frames knowledge of modernism as an essential accessory for the fashionable woman, claiming that ‘an acquaintance with at least such names as Matisse and Picasso has become part of the outfit of every hostess and every diner-out’.116 This new enthusiasm for experimental painting in Vogue was matched by enthusiasm for experimentalism across the arts. The July 1923 Summer Sales Number, for example, included articles on Margaret Morris’s modern dance technique and Edith Sitwell and William Walton’s Façade alongside the latest season’s fashions. Just like the summer sales, which, as Sydney Tremayne asserts in this issue, ‘magically’ make possible ‘the aspiration of every class to imitate the habiliments and the vices of the class immediately above it’, mid-1920s Vogue brought high culture that was likely otherwise ‘unattainable’ to readers within their reach.117 While Vogue gave readers access to modernism, however, the magazine continued to emphasize its strangeness and difficulty. Under the pseudonym ‘Gerald Cumberland’, Charles Kenyon reviewed the first public performance of Façade at the Æolian Hall on 12 June 1923, delighting in the odd fusion of Walton’s music and Sitwell’s poetry recited through a stage curtain designed by Frank Dobson. ‘An enormous female face looked down’, Kenyon recalled, and from ‘her open mouth issued a sengerphone pointed—oh, so thrillingly!—in our direction’, behind which ‘Miss Edith Sitwell was stationed, her clever head full of her strangely

86  Modernism in Fashion disturbing poetry’.118 ‘It was an attempt at the elimination of personality’, Kenyon asserts: ‘Miss Sitwell half spoke, half shouted, her poems in strict monotone’, while ‘Mr. Walton’s music was clever. It had intuition, it understood the words’.119 As Hammill notes, ‘Kenyon’s review aligns Sitwell with tendencies of what was already beginning to be called modernism’ by associating her ‘with radical newness—“Miss Sitwell, then, has discovered and tried a new method of interpretation”—and with eccentricity: “Her bizarre work demands a bizarre setting, a bizarre delivery”’.120 The references to ‘intuition’, ‘impersonality’, difficulty, and cleverness further ally the performance with contemporary conceptions of modernist experimentalism. Hammill identifies this Vogue review of Façade as one of the ‘most appreciative’ among ‘a mixture of the indignant, the baffled, and the cautiously admiring’ in the British press at this time.121 The review brings this premiere performance within reach of Vogue’s readers, while continuing to emphasize its intellectual challenge and unconventionality as markers of its exclusivity. Modernism trended in British Vogue as Todd significantly increased the magazine’s coverage of arts and cultural content as a whole, including but not limited to modernism, by expanding long-running arts features, such as ‘Seen on the Stage’, and printing special articles on the arts and literary topics often authored by famous writers, such as Aldous Huxley, Paul Morand, Edith Sitwell, and Vita Sackville-West. Retitled ‘New Books for the Morning Room Table’ during 1924–26, Vogue’s book column became a prominent signed feature usually written by Mortimer with occasional contributions by others including Sackville-West, Leonard Woolf, Edwin Muir, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Mortimer celebrated an array of modernist writers in this column, pronouncing H. D. ‘a prodigy’, Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown ‘the finest account imaginable of the present situation of the novelist’, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ‘the most remarkable poem written in English in this century’.122 During 1924–26, the years in which arts and literary content peaked in interwar Vogue, the magazine referred to modernist artists and works in almost every issue and sometimes included several references to experimental aesthetics within a single number. To give a sample of this content, over the course of 1925 Vogue printed articles on modern architecture (‘How Europe Builds To-Day’, Late January 1925), modern dance and modern music (‘The Russian Ballet’, Early June 1925; ‘Jazz and Mr. Gershwin’, Late June 1925; Edwin Evans, ‘New Music at Venice’, Early October 1925) as well as essays by modern writers on contemporary literature, including Edith Sitwell on women’s poetry (Early March 1925) and Gertrude Stein (Late October 1925), Richard Aldington on T. S. Eliot (Early April 1925) and modern free verse (Late September 1925 and Early December 1925), and Virginia Woolf on George Moore (Early June 1925). Art criticism included essays on ‘Marie Laurencin’ (Late January 1925), ‘The Dada Masks of Hiler’ (Late January 1925), ‘The Posters

Modernism in Fashion  87 of E. McKnight Kauffer’ (Late May 1925), ‘Jean Cocteau’s Drawings’ (Late June 1925), ‘The Work of Fernand Léger’ (Early October 1925), and ‘The Art of Brancusi’ (Late December 1925). Todd’s Vogue printed poetry, including poems by Aldington, Edith Sitwell, and Osbert Sitwell in 1925; the Christmas number also contained a short story by David Garnett. The magazine’s construction of writers as celebrity figures, discussed further in Chapter 4, was facilitated by repeated appearances of authors within and across issues of Vogue as well as Todd’s introduction of ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’. This serial feature, borrowed from Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, presented images of writers, artists, performers, and thinkers with brief captions justifying their nomination with reference to selected accomplishments within their respective fields (for an example and analysis of the ‘Hall of Fame’ see Chapter 4, Figure 4.2). In 1925, Vogue’s ‘Hall of Fame’ showcased, among others, H. Havelock Ellis (Early February 1925); Nancy Cunard (Late April 1925); Sergei Diaghilev and Georges Braque (Early June 1925); Igor Stravinsky (Late June 1925); Juan Gris, Erik Satie, and Lytton Strachey (Early July 1925); and Le Corbusier (Early December 1925). Eve never contained this depth of arts reporting or this concentration of coverage of modernism, but the magazine also expanded its cultural content after 1924. New serial features on stage and screen included ‘Second Thoughts on First Nights’, ‘The Picture Play’, and ‘Green-Room Gossip’. The artist John Kettelwell provided striking modern caricatures of performers from shows playing in London, including the operetta The Desert Song at Drury Lane (1 June 1927), the new season of the Ballet Russes at the Princes Theatre (15 June 1927), and a revival of Elmer Rice’s expressionist The Adding Machine at the Court Theatre (25 January 1928) (see Figure 2.2). Literature, in particular, now attracted much greater attention. In addition to the fiction that had always been a staple of Eve’s offering, literary news and celebrities became prominent when the magazine’s book column was taken over in April 1925 by Richard King (Richard King Huskinson), popular essayist and columnist for Eve and The Tatler. Then titled ‘Talking about Books…’, Eve’s book column was extended from one to two full pages enriched with multiple captioned images of famous writers and inset text boxes offering ‘Sharp Sayings from the New Books’ and a short blurb on King’s selection of ‘The Book of the Week’.123 Directed by King, the column reviewed and promoted an eclectic mix of writers of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Cartoon sketches supplied by the artist Paul Bloomfield during 1927– 28, for example, featured Rosamund Lehmann (17 August 1927), Arthur Marshall (21 September 1927), Michael Arlen (9 November 1927), Stella Benson (21 March 1928), Virginia Woolf (4 April 1928), Storm Jameson (11 April 1928), and Lytton Strachey (10 October 1928). In the late 1920s, Eve printed signed articles by well-known authors, such as Rebecca West’s ‘Things Women Must Unlearn’ (23 Sept 1925), Sylvia

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Figure 2.2 John Kettelwell, ‘When Diaghileff Calls the Tune’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 15 June 1927.

Modernism in Fashion  89 Townsend Warner’s ‘Modern Witches’ (18 August 1926), Stella Benson’s ‘Concert on Board’ (1 September 1926), Winifred Holtby’s ‘Snobbery at it’s [sic.] Zenith?’ (26 November 1927), Edith Sitwell’s ‘Amusements that Amuse’ (29 Feb 1928), and Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waxworks at the Abbey’ (23 May 1928). As Vike M. Plock attests, ‘during the second half of the magazine’s lifespan, the number of references to women writers rose significantly’ with ‘[t]he years 1927–29 […] particularly fertile ones for the popularisation of modern and modernist women writers’ work’.124 In comparison to Vogue, where coverage of the arts and modernism was at its height in 1924–26, Eve’s cultural content and attention to modernism peaked later in the decade. During 1928, just under a third of Eve’s weekly issues included a feature on an experimental art form, an example of work by a modernist artist or writer, or an image of a modernist celebrity. This arts commentary included reviews of exhibitions by Marie Vassilieff (4 Jan 1928), Paule Vézelay (14 March 1928), and Gwen Raverat (11 April 1928), an article by Leon Feuchtwanger on Bertolt Brecht (6 June 1928), and a double-page spread of photographs of dancers of the Ballets Russes promoting the company’s latest London season (25 July 1928). In November 1928, Storm Jameson, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Bowen contributed fiction to Eve’s Christmas number. Eve’s coverage of modernism remained less informed and less informative than Vogue’s arts commentary in the mid1920s. Plock notes that references to modern writers in Eve are often ‘unfortunately marred by errors and misspellings that might indicate unfamiliarity with the contents sporadically advocated’, such as retitling Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse as ‘The Lighthouse’ (23 May 1928) and Radclyffe Hall’s Adam’s Breed as ‘Adam’s Bread’ (29 August 1928).125 Eve’s exhibition reviews similarly suggest limited knowledge of experimentalism in the arts due to the ambiguity of their commentary: the surrealist painter John Armstrong is promoted as an ‘exhilarating and highly original modernist’, for example, but there is little specific engagement with his artistic style, which is described simply as ‘wholly diverting’.126 Despite such limitations, or perhaps more forcefully because of them, Eve’s coverage of modernism in the late 1920s shows how modernism trended beyond the high cultural centre among non-specialist audiences at this time. Plock asserts that ‘the appearance of modernist voices in this particular periodical attest to modernism’s availability to readers (female, middle class, with domestic interests) not conventionally associated with avant-garde art forms’.127 Within Eve, however, as within Vogue, it was modernism’s perceived uniqueness and exclusivity that were prized. Thus when reviewing Vassilieff’s ‘one-man show’ at the Beaux Arts Galleries, Eve’s editorial copy stresses how ‘different’ her work is from ‘the usual run of arts, crafts, and decorative trifles’, and that though this ‘brilliant Russian […] is so well known all over the

90  Modernism in Fashion Continent’, she has ‘never before exhibited in London’.128 By printing photographs of Vassilieff’s ‘joyously witty and fantastic’ portrait dolls of ‘Parisian celebrities’, including Cocteau, Matisse, Picasso, and Poiret, the magazine gives its readers the illusion of access to this exhibition and the sophisticated high cultural sphere these figures represent.129 Eve ceased publication in April 1929 when the paper merged with Britannia.130 Meanwhile, in Vogue, Todd’s departure in 1926 had led to a gradual movement away from modernism in the magazine. Todd’s campaign to combine literature and art with high fashion had never been supported by Nast and Chase and, as profits fell, she was fired.131 Chase came to London to temporarily take control of the British edition and commentary on the arts and literature diminished during 1927. However, the magazine’s book column remained a significant signed feature until 1929. On 21 September 1927, Humbert Wolfe favourably reviewed Woolf’s To the Lighthouse positioning her as the creator of ‘a new form’ of fiction but ‘a perilous guide to follow’ for imitators ‘in the Virginia Woolf school’.132 On 9 January 1929, Edith Sitwell reviewed T. S. Eliot’s Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, praising ‘the extraordinary fluency’ and ‘elasticity’ of Pound’s poetry and ‘the deep and experienced beauty of his imagery’.133 On 1 May 1929, Mary MacCarthy responded irreverently to James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, later the eighth chapter of Finnegans Wake, calling it ‘a little book of experimental nonsense’ and ‘a good example of the “Back to Infancy” movement; not quite a pair, but anyway a pendent to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons’.134 ‘Wyndham Lewis has called Miss Stein “The highbrow clown”’, MacCarthy asserts, ‘Now that Mr. Joyce has definitely gone “super-realist”, may not he be described as a highbrow Harlequin?’135 Even when the target of satire, experimental artists and writers and their works continue to signify high culture and to carry cultural capital in the magazine. On 17 April 1929, R. H. Wilenski hailed Picasso ‘the most amazing of all contemporary artists’ in an article on ‘Picasso as Decorator’.136 The first exhibition of Unit One at the Mayor Gallery prompted an illustrated article in Vogue on 18 April 1934 on the studio spaces of Edward Wadsworth, Ben Nicolson, and Colin Lucas, and on 10 June 1936 Cecil Beaton wrote nostalgically on the history of the Ballets Russes. Modernism did not vanish from Vogue after Todd, but it was never again subject to the sustained scrutiny and promotion of the Todd years. Modernist art, literature, design, and dance attracted occasional attention in Vogue after 1929, but the trending of modernism in Vogue and Eve in the 1920s was over.

Fashioning Modernism in Harper’s Bazaar, 1929–39 While Vogue and Eve approached modernist aesthetic experiments in the late 1910s and early 1920s as an unfamiliar bohemian fad and then, as the 1920s progressed, a vital modern trend, the British edition of

Modernism in Fashion  91 Harper’s Bazaar only came into being when modernism’s major figures and methods were well known. By October 1929, when the first issue of British Harper’s Bazaar appeared, interiority and free verse in literature and expressionism and abstraction in the visual arts were still prone to parody and ridicule, but these aesthetic techniques were widely recognized and their highbrow status firmly established. In its first decade of publication, and particularly during 1929–34, this upmarket fashion monthly exploited the high cultural capital associated with modernist experimentation and its practitioners to support the marketing of the magazine as an elite women’s periodical. At its launch, Harper’s Bazaar was distinct in the UK women’s magazine market in combining fashion and society news with both quality fiction and sustained coverage of the arts, which had steadily decreased in prominence in Vogue after 1927. P. Joyce Reynolds, the magazine’s first editor, assumed and expanded readers’ interests in high culture by printing writing by highbrow authors, including those associated with experimentalism, and reviews of the ballet, the visual arts, and highbrow literature, including overt commentary on modernism. Like Vogue and Eve, Harper’s Bazaar idealized originality and the new and thus prized modernism’s reputation for radicalism and avant-gardism. While Vogue and Eve in the 1910s and 1920s positioned modernism firmly in the present, however, Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s as often approached modernism retrospectively. Looking back on modernism’s origins as well as debating its contemporary significance, this glossy fashion periodical marketed modernism and knowledge of modernism as a valuable commodity. By printing and debating modernism, the magazine increased its cultural capital and the cultural competence of its readers while also fashioning the reception of modernist writers, artists, and their works. As I have argued previously, early Harper’s Bazaar framed its readers as subjects of an elite culture, regardless of their socio-economic background, by offering them access to designer fashions, aristocracy, the arts, and celebrity and by addressing them as informed observers of and participants in this lifestyle.137 This process of interpellation, to evoke Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology’s recruitment of subjects, was facilitated by casual allusions to high art and literature scattered across the magazine’s content.138 A summary of the next season’s trends in accessories from November 1930, for example, punningly incorporated the title of a Shakespearean comedy and Iago’s ‘trifles, light as air’ from Act 3, Scene 3 of Othello into its final fanciful claim that: ‘These, Madame, are the trifles, light as air, which tell you a new season is with you, with the rhythm and the joy of much ado about nothings’.139 ‘With Miss. Gertrude Stein’s permission’, Nika Dittman declared in the opening of a report on Italian culture from December 1934, ‘in Italy a woman is a woman is a woman and a man is a man is a man’.140 Such apparently nonchalant references to high culture are part of the magazine’s strategies of

92  Modernism in Fashion bluff, as seen in Vogue and Eve, through which it suggests cultural competence. These vacuous allusions to Shakespeare and Stein imply more knowledge than they demonstrate; they assume and enhance the reader’s cultural competence, and crucially enable readers to recognize themselves as effortlessly sophisticated. These allusions function in the manner of Althusser’s hail, his analogy for the mechanisms of interpellation whereby an individual hearing ‘Hey, you there!’ in the street turns and identifies himself as subject.141 If the female reader is familiar with the allusion to Othello in the above account of the new season’s accessories, this recognition allies her with the ‘Madame’ to whom it is addressed. Through such strategies, Harper’s Bazaar interpellated its readers into a sophisticated public united by advanced cultural knowledge – or, rather, the illusion of cultural knowledge. Its audience’s frame of reference was expected to include familiarity with a wide range of high cultural works, from canonical literature to Stein’s modernist writing as well as popular culture. The visual rhetoric of modernism was also referenced by Harper’s Bazaar’s fashion pages in the 1930s, particularly under the direction of Brodovitch from 1934. Modernist aesthetics infused Brodovitch’s inventive page layouts and some of the magazine’s most arresting fashion images, which included surrealist-inspired photography using collage effects or presenting female body parts, such as legs or hands, abstracted and eroticized. Such images were complemented by the discourse of modernity evoked by the magazine’s fashion copy, which also overlapped with the discourse of modernism. These exchanges can be seen in Beatrice Mathieu’s ‘Paris 1935’, a report on the new season’s styles seen on the streets in Paris, which opens: For Paris, 1935 is the present. There is no longer a 1934, no longer any past; there is only a future. Only the consciousness of constant change, and of swift-passing time. Anything might happen, nobody knows what. […] The present is a paradox. There are no set rules; yet somewhere underneath is the solidity of an exquisite tradition.142 This opening caption and the article below it appear in diagonal columns to striking effect against the white, blank space of the surrounding page (Figure 2.3). The arrangement of the text evokes the experimental typography of modernist literature, while the caption’s short, declarative statements – announcing the obliteration of the past and then, contradictorily, the persistence of tradition – bring to mind the combative tone of early modernist manifesto statements by the futurists and the vorticists. References to ‘consciousness’ and ‘swift-passing time’ evoke the interiority associated with contemporary experiments in psychological realism and the influence of Henri Bergson on modernist fiction.

Figure 2 . 3 Man Ray photograph beside B eatrice Mathieu, ‘Paris 1935’, Har pe r’s Baz a ar, October 1934.

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94  Modernism in Fashion The article shifts into an informal, conversational voice to detail ‘women crossing the Champs-Élysées, wearing ankle-length dresses’ and the ‘crowd at the Cremaillère […] wearing sables or blue fox’, but retains the hyperbole characteristic of both modernist rhetoric and fashion copy with new Parisian styles signalling ‘the beginning of a new epoch’ and the assertion ‘that the really creative thing is born of the individual, not of machines’.143 This article sits alongside a full-page fashion photograph by Man Ray, his second contribution to Harper’s Bazaar after Brodovitch convinced the avant-garde photographer to produce fashion photographs for the magazine.144 In his early work for Harper’s Bazaar, Willis Hartshorn notes, ‘one can see how Man Ray substitutes imagination for the clearly defined rendering of clothes’ in a manner that suggests the artistic effect of the image is ‘more important than the accurate presentation of the product’.145 His experimental photographs were complemented by Brodovitch’s experimental page layouts. The diagonal columns of ‘Paris 1935’, for example, parallel the stark diagonal line created by the elongated silhouette of the statuesque female model in a floor-length black evening gown against the empty, pale background in Man Ray’s photograph on the opposite page. The faceless model stands against light and shadow instead of a traditional studio set, her head cropped at the top of the image and feet hidden beneath her dress. The photograph demonstrates the avant-gardism of Man Ray’s commercial fashion photography and is notably uncaptioned; the dress and its French designer, Augustabernard, are evidently less significant to Brodovitch and Harper’s Bazaar than the photographer, who signs the image ‘Man Ray Paris’ in the bottom right-hand corner as an artist signs a work of art.146 For Man Ray, Hartshorn observes, ‘[t]here were no fixed boundaries between what he did for his art and what he did for commerce’.147 Man Ray’s photograph, like the Mathieu article beside it, combines high fashion and avant-garde aesthetics. Brodovitch’s arrangement of image and text likewise reflects the convergence of modernism and fashion and, given the influence of Brodovitch’s style on later women’s magazines, demonstrates one route through which modernist design moved into the mainstream. In Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s, these elements of the magazine signalled its radicalism and originality and supported the promotion of its pages as an aesthetically superior space. While modernist-inspired design was visible in Harper’s Bazaar increasingly through the 1930s, modernist art and literature received most attention in the first five years of the magazine’s run. Between October 1929 and December 1931, over a third of Harper’s Bazaar’s issues included at least one item of modernist content, whether a piece of modernist writing, a reproduction of modernist artwork, an article on modernist architecture or décor, or a review of modernist art or literature. The magazine printed Richard Aldington’s poem ‘Attente’ in

Modernism in Fashion  95 December 1929 inset within an article by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf’s short fiction ‘In the Looking Glass’ in January 1930 with her name advertised on the cover, and Gertrude Stein’s story ‘Left to Right’ in September 1931 facing a full-page abstract illustration by Claude Flight.148 Articles on modernist design included Derek Patmore’s ‘Forecast—or Fact?’ (January 1930), an illustrated report on a Chicago home ‘in the new style of modern architecture’ headed by a quotation from Le Corbusier, and ‘Ultra-Modernism in Paris’, a photo-feature on the art deco interior and furniture produced by J. J. Adnet for La Compagnie des Arts Français (August 1930).149 R. H. Wilenski provided criticism of modernist as well as classical art. In May 1931, he lamented that ‘the most skilful, the most sincere, the most poetical’ artists in England are not known to ‘the public as a whole’ because the Royal Academy ‘has frowned so repeatedly and publicly upon the modern movement in painting and sculpture’.150 Accompanied by 19 images of works by Duncan Grant, Barbara Hepworth, and Jacob Epstein among others, and praising the painting of Paul Nash in particular, this illustrated article exposes readers to contemporary artwork he alleges is ‘exclusively enjoyed by a minority of the population’ and deftly initiates them into this audience.151 Alongside reviewing new experiments by the contemporary avantgarde, Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s continued to refer back to modernism of the 1910s and 1920s as a means of demonstrating the magazine’s cultural sophistication. During 1930–31, C. R. W. Nevinson contributed a series of five articles ‘on the world’s greatest personalities in present-day art’ that blend art criticism with memoir to offer commentary on the major European schools in modernist painting, including vorticism, futurism, fauvism, surrealism, and expressionism, alongside personal anecdotes of famous modernist artists.152 The editorial caption above the first essay emphasizes Nevinson’s ‘unique authority’ as ‘a famous painter […] concerned in the start of many modern movements’, who ‘has met in person nearly all the artists he mentions’.153 These essays function as an act of self-promotion, which Harper’s Bazaar facilitates in order to trade on Nevinson’s celebrity. They also provide overt instruction on modernist art and an accessible account of the evolution of modernist movements in different national contexts. In ‘Outstanding Artists in France To-day’ (September 1930), Nevinson explains that ‘all modern art has its roots in Paris’, with reference to the French Impressionists, their influence on the Post-Impressionists and Cubists, and the role of Paris’s art dealers in creating a productive climate for modern art in France.154 As well as tracing the origins and development of major contemporary movements, Nevinson introduces the reader to the most important artists associated with each school. ‘Outstanding Artists in Spain To-day’ (November 1930) positions cubism as a development from the work of El Greco and Cézanne before detailing the different stages of

96  Modernism in Fashion Picasso’s career to date, with reference to his ‘blue period’, for example, and the importance of ‘Gertrude Stein, the modernist poet who was the first to patronise this particular phase’, as well as ‘the purely abstract paintings of still-life for which he is now chiefly known’.155 The article is complemented by a full-page black-and-white reproduction of a Picasso drawing from a series on mother and child, or Mere et Enfant, here titled ‘La Maternité’ (1922).156 Each of Nevinson’s articles, except the last in the series, is likewise accompanied by images of modernist artwork. Together his essays supply a concise history of modernist art, which oscillates between an instructive and an intimate tone. Nevinson’s history is scattered with gossipy caricatures that parallel the familiar mode of address of the magazine’s celebrity pages. Modiligani is ‘a quiet, charming-mannered Italian’ whom Nevinson ‘knew […] as well as, if not better than, most men’.157 Of Van Dongen, we are told: ‘His parties are wonderful. He, though host, often does not attend them. “All Paris” does, though’.158 Nevinson’s articles enable readers of Harper’s Bazaar to enhance their sophistication by increasing their understanding of modernist art and gaining insider knowledge of the character and lifestyle of its famous personalities. At a time when the major figures of modernism were beginning to take their place in emerging narratives of twentieth-century art and literature, Harper’s Bazaar participated in the construction of these narratives and debated modernism’s legacy. Whether celebrating or satirizing modernist writers and artists, the magazine promoted their reception as highbrow celebrities and allied their works with intellectual culture. In the same November 1930 issue in which Nevinson’s article ‘Outstanding Artists in Spain To-Day’ appeared alongside Picasso’s ‘La Maternité’, Evelyn Waugh mocks the modernist avant-garde within his light article ‘Let Us Return to the Nineties, But Not to Oscar Wilde’. In this humorous defence of contemporary nostalgia for the 1890s, Waugh, a staunch critic of modernist fiction, presents the twentieth-century’s artistic pursuit of the new as futile and stale. ‘There is an unhappy man in Paris called M. Cocteau whose whole life is occupied in trying to be modern’, he writes, ‘and there are some people in Bloomsbury with the same idea, but—whether because they started later, or work less feverishly, I do not know—these poor Britons have never quite caught up’.159 ‘[T]he artists and writers who can justly claim to be thought avant garde are almost always middle-aged or quite elderly people—M. Picasso or Mr. James Joyce’, Waugh observes, before wryly arguing that ‘there was quite a lot one could say about the painting of ten years ago’ provided ‘one had learned the jargon […] “recession”, “planes”, “significance”, etc.’, but when stood ‘before a painting by M. Picasso in his latest manner, the most glib tongue is compelled to silence’.160 This article reflects some of the common criticisms made of modernism by commentators in the early 1920s – that its difficulty was a stunt, an intellectual game, or a passing fad for over-sophistication – and indicates how these criticisms persisted

Modernism in Fashion  97 into the 1930s and were familiar in public discourse. ‘When Max Eastman, irritated with the prevalence of difficulty, titled his famous 1929 Harper’s essay “The Cult of Unintelligibility”’, Diepeveen asserts, ‘he could count on his readers to know exactly the cultural phenomenon to which he was referring’.161 Similarly, Waugh expects British readers of Harper’s Bazaar to understand his reference to the jargon of modern art as a shorthand for such debates, which were so widespread that ‘modernism’s difficulty was part of most readers’ casual knowledge’.162 His article posits that the modernist experiments of the preceding decade have now run their course; ‘it is the essence of fashion that it should be fluid’, he contends, ‘Unable to go forward, it goes back’.163 Less than fifteen pages away, however, Nevinson explains that Cubism is one of the ‘most misunderstood […] of all the modern movements in art’ and defends and explains the work of its leading practitioners, including Picasso.164 The magazine further promotes Picasso’s work through reproducing a full-page image of his work with a caption that claims this drawing of a mother and child ‘explodes for good and all the myths that Cubism was the result of incompetency and the inability to draw realistically’.165 The two articles and the image work in dialogue within the issue to debate the continued value and relevance of modernist experimentation and of Picasso and his infamous cubist style in particular. Though Waugh and Nevinson present opposing positions, both associate modernism with a restricted audience. Readers of Harper’s Bazaar, whether they have previously attended to the work of Picasso or not, are situated as engaged participants in this debate and furnished with potential opinions. Articles and reviews in Harper’s Bazaar across the early 1930s engage with the question of whether modernism is an outdated fashion or a lasting and significant aesthetic movement. In March 1930, in a review of contemporary sculpture by Eric Kennington, Alan Durst, Maurice Lambert, Barbara Hepworth, Ossip Zadkine, Charles Wheeler, Frank Dobson, and Ancrid Johnstone, Wilenski acknowledged that ‘the new spirit that pervades the sculpture of our age which draws no inspiration from the nineteenth-century sources’ can be troubling, but asserts that ‘to those who are not afraid of the twentieth century—which has now run nearly one third of its course—this modern Renaissance of sculpture is not a disturbing but a heartening sight’.166 Wilenski frames modernist art as both radically modern and a return to classic principles and anticipates its longevity. Robert Byron argues conversely in Harper’s Bazaar in June 1933: We have heard much—too much perhaps—about the “new tendencies” in painting. From the impressionists to the post-impressionists, from the vorticists to the surréalists, the tide of novelty has flowed, till now at last the ebb has come, and to paint like Ingres—if anyone could—is to be a model of fashionable innovation.167

98  Modernism in Fashion ‘None the less’, he concedes, ‘the ferment of the past decade has some concrete achievement to its credit’ and its ‘new and valid interpretation of the painter’s function’, he poses, ‘has been carried to its logical conclusion in the hands of a small band of artists’ whose works ‘may please the visual sense, [but] make appeal primary to the intelligence’.168 While dismissing the modernist groupings of the preceding decades as unfashionable, Byron’s article favourably reviews the abstract and surrealist art of Unit One and their exhibition at the Mayor Gallery. This June 1933 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, as will be explored in Chapter 4, also contained the first of three instalments of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Thus, as Byron positions modernist art as so ubiquitous as to have become passé, Stein, writing in the persona of Toklas, recalls when the experimental paintings of Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, Gaugin, and others were just beginning to be shown in pre-war Paris and tries ‘to give some idea of the kind of uneasiness one felt when one first looked at all these pictures’.169 Together these features trace a line of evolution from startling early modernist experiments in cubism and fauvism to the intellectually challenging paintings reproduced alongside Byron’s article by Tristram Hillier, Max Ernst, Ben Nicolson, John Armstrong, and their 1930s contemporaries. Reading across such features attending to modernism within a single issue or across issues of Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1930s shows how, through them, the magazine opened up a space for readers to explore the history and present direction of experimentalism in the arts. This coverage extended beyond the familiar criticisms of modernism, while continuing to emphasize its difficulty as evidence of modernism’s high cultural value. From 1935, coverage of modernism in Harper’s Bazaar decreased substantially. High modernism had had its heyday. Following Brodovitch’s appointment, however, the look of the magazine was informed by, and capitalized on, the modernity associated with modernist aesthetics. Brodovitch’s cover for the November 1935 issue presented an explosion of words in different fonts spilling out at all angles over a black top hat. In another striking example from August 1936, the magazine printed a composite photograph by Peter Rose Pulham of a female model wearing a series of black felt caps ‘clasped with shells, lilywhite hands holding poppies, grapes, sharps and flats, lips, oases’ designed by Aage Thaarup and inspired by the recent ‘Sur-realist exhibition in London’.170 Four of the five headshots are layered over a central image to create one large surrealist photograph, in which the piercing eye of the central portrait looks out from the forehead of the same model in one the smaller inset images. In February 1937, Salvador Dali contributed an article on ‘Surrealism in Hollywood’ and a line-drawn portrait of Harpo Marx.171 In December 1938, the magazine reproduced Marc Chagall’s ‘A Christmas Fantasy’ in full colour.172 There were three further stories by Woolf in 1938–39.173 Harper’s Bazaar continued to exploit the cultural capital

Modernism in Fashion  99 associated with modernism in the late 1930s, but it was during 1929–34 that modernist art and literature were most fashionable, and their reception most actively fashioned, in the magazine.

Conclusions ‘As a fashion spreads its elegance necessarily diminishes’, Raymond Mortimer reflects in Vogue in August 1924; ‘If persons with taste start it, persons without taste gradually take it up’.174 Within the world of fashion, Burstein explains, ‘To be duplicated is to be successful; to be sold means to be copied’.175 These acts of imitation and replication are full of tensions, between the authentic and the inauthentic, the unique and the ubiquitous. As modernism trended in Vogue and Eve in the 1920s and in Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1930s, the dialogue between fashion and modernism was evident in numerous references to originality, innovation, and authenticity across their fashion journalism, advertising, and arts commentary as well as in their modernist-inspired fashion illustration, photography, and design. As modernist strategies became increasingly well known, their potential to shock and unsettle diminished. Modernism never lost its symbolic capital in these magazines, which was consolidated as experimental writers and artists moved from notoriety to canonicity in the later interwar period, but its cultural cachet had less value for the fashion conscious once modernist aesthetics became more mainstream and modernist writers more widely read. Evoking the philosophy of Simmel, Burstein reminds us that ‘differentiation is integral to the survival of any particular fashion’.176 Fashion’s elitist logic compelled Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar, whether promoting or ridiculing modernism, to emphasize its modernity, innovation, perceived exclusivity, and association with the high cultural sphere. Coverage of modernism peaked in the three magazines at different times: in Vogue during 1924–26, in Eve during 1927–29, and in Harper’s Bazaar in 1930–33. Commentary on modernist art and literature in Vogue and Eve in the late 1910s and 1920s reflected wider debates surrounding modernism at this time, and, particularly, responses to modernist difficulty. Fashion provided these upmarket magazines with an additional lens through which to negotiate modernism’s novelties, challenges, and strangeness. Todd’s Vogue, directed by its Bloomsbury contributors, brought modernism into fashion and presented knowledge of modernism as desirable for its fashion-conscious female readers. Eve followed suit, with the limitations in this magazine’s discussion of modernist writers, artists, and their works indicating modernism’s trending among a non-specialist audience. By the 1930s, modernism’s highbrow status was assured and Harper’s Bazaar capitalized on it to generate an atmosphere of cultural sophistication in the magazine during its early years. Though these upmarket British fashion magazines facilitated the

100  Modernism in Fashion spread of modernism to new readers and equipped them with strategies to negotiate its complexities, however, they did not always present modernism as easy to access and understand. On the contrary, this chapter has shown, it was in the editorial interests of these magazines to position modernism as difficult and the preserve of a minority audience even as they extended this audience to include their readers. Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar sustained distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, modernist and popular, at the same time as facilitating modernism’s movement into the mainstream.

Notes 1 Editorial, Vogue, Late March 1922, p. 25. 2 Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan, ‘Introduction: Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion’, in Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion, ed. by Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011), pp. 1–15 (p. 3). 3 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 40. 4 On these changes, see Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, pp. 32–44, 73–80. 5 Elizabeth M. Sheehan, Modernism à la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2018), p. 2. 6 Significant examples of this work include: Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); R. S. Koppen, Virginia Woolf, Fashion, and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Ilya Parkins, Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity (London: Berg, 2012); Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012); Vike Martina Plock, Modernism, Fashion, and Interwar Writers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); and Sheehan, Modernism à la Mode (2018). 7 Nicola Luckhurst, Bloomsbury in Vogue (London: Cecil Woolf, 1998); Jane Garrity, ‘Selling Culture to the “Civilized”: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity’, Modernism/Modernity, 6.2 (1999), 29–58; Christopher Reed, ‘A Vogue That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Sexual Subculture During the Editorship of Dorothy Todd, 1922–26’, Fashion Theory, 10.1/2 (2006), 39–72; Aurelea Mahood, ‘Fashioning Readers: The Avant Garde and British Vogue, 1920–9’, Women: A Cultural Review, 13.1 (2002), 37–47. See also, Lisa Cohen, ‘“Frock Consciousness”: Virginia Woolf, the Open Secret, and the Language of Fashion’, Fashion Theory, 3.2 (1999), 149–74. 8 Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith, Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture: Canadian Periodicals in English and French, 1925–1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), p. 134. This book focuses on Canadian magazines, but its observations about the overlap between modernist rhetoric and interwar fashion copy equally apply to British magazines of this period. 9 Garrity, ‘Selling Culture’, p. 32; Faye Hammill, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 160. 10 Hammill and Smith, pp. 135–6. 11 Ibid., pp. 129–30; internal quotation from Parkins and Sheehan, p. 3. 12 Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’ [1904], The American Journal of Sociology 62. 6 (1957), 541–58 (p. 547).

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3

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment

As inherently eclectic and multi-vocal documents, periodicals invite and embody debate. During the interwar years, an era in which women’s social and domestic roles were swiftly evolving and under constant review, women’s magazines provided a productive space for exploring different views on women’s lives and the workings of the society around them. Through their editorials, special articles, and fiction, interwar women’s magazines probed diverse opinions on women’s changing roles and prized contributions from well-known writers on such subjects that were witty, provocative, and entertaining. This chapter examines how a selection of prominent interwar women writers used their women’s magazine writing, including essays and short stories, to present dissident feminist positions and to experiment with routine forms. It chooses for analysis articles in Good Housekeeping by Margaret Storm Jameson and Rose Macaulay, and short fiction in Eve and Harper’s Bazaar by Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia Woolf. This chapter reads their women’s magazine contributions among the routine content of these periodicals in order to show how modernism existed alongside and within broader undercurrents of feminist experimentalism and narrative play within these interwar women’s magazines. The explosion in periodical publishing in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as in America, produced a flood of essays to fill the pages of new mass daily, weekly, and monthly publications. ‘It was during this period that the humorous essay moved from the literary quarterlies back to the newspapers and magazines’, observes Ned Stuckey-French, and in which familiar essays, defined by Dan Roche as ‘highly informal in tone, often humorous, valuing lightness of touch’, and ‘filled with intimate personal observations and reflections’, were ‘written for their own sake, rather than for the sake of the subject’.1 Humorous essays, personal essays, combative essays, and light conversational essays on all manner of everyday subjects proliferated in the periodical press. By the early twentieth century, the essay was so pervasive it provoked a backlash reflecting wider contemporary anxieties about the threat of mass media to literary and intellectual culture. In ‘An Essay upon Essays upon Essays’ (1929), Hilaire Belloc noted ‘the

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  107 foison of essays in the present generation’ and defended the form against those who despair at ‘this excess of essays’ by writers who ‘drivel away week by week, or even day after day, for [a] living’. 2 A prominent essayist himself (counting Dean Inge, G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, and Robert Lynd among his ‘colleagues in this same trade’), Belloc mocks these ‘enemies of the modern essay’ who argue ‘it cannot possibly find sufficient subject-matter for so excessive an output’ and ‘are particularly annoyed by the gathering of the same into little books, which they think a further shocking sin against taste’.3 Later used to preface a book of Belloc’s own essays, this essay voices common criticisms levelled at this ubiquitous form, which was strongly associated with commercial middlebrow culture in the interwar years. In this heyday of the light essay or ‘middle’ – so-called because of its central position in newspapers and magazines of the period – Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar all printed essays by celebrity writers and public figures. Special articles were a staple of early Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar in the interwar years with names of the most famous contributors, such as Arnold Bennett, Rose Macaulay, Clare Sheridan, and Frank Swinnerton, advertised on the front cover to attract readers. Eve’s issues also often included one or two signed essays, though these fluctuated in prominence through the magazine’s run. In the late 1920s, the magazine secured more signed articles by well-known authors and personalities including Rosita Forbes, Winifred Holtby, R. H. Mottram, and Viola Tree. Vogue’s content during 1916–39 was largely unsigned, though there are occasional examples of essays by celebrity writers in the magazine through this period, such as Dorothy Parker’s ‘Lovely Woman as the Honest Labouring Man’ (Early August 1919) or Beverley Nichols’s ‘Garden Monologue’ (9 August 1933). During Dorothy Todd’s mid-1920s editorship of Vogue signed articles became a regular feature with repeated contributions from writers such as Aldous Huxley, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf. Fiction, another beneficiary of the rise of mass print culture, was a mainstay of women’s magazines. ‘The association between women readers and fiction, begun in the eighteenth century’, the authors of Women’s Worlds (1991) maintain, ‘continued through the nineteenth century’ and ‘was an important element in the development of the nineteenthcentury periodical press, especially in the latter part of the century with the advent of large numbers of fiction magazines aimed at middle-class women’.4 Many women’s magazines of the interwar period continued to print short stories and serialize novels, including the cheaper ‘pulp fiction’ periodicals aimed at working-class female readers such as Peg’s Paper (1919–40), Red Star (1929–83), and Miracle (1935–58), but also women’s fiction and service magazines produced for middle-class consumption.5 Of the magazines surveyed in this study, only Vogue did not

108  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment routinely publish short stories or serials. Fiction was central to Hearst’s Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar. Owned by an international publisher, these magazines could attract and afford big name contributors such as E. M. Delafield, John Galsworthy, Kathleen Norris, and Hugh Walpole. By the late 1920s, Good Housekeeping issues included four or five short stories plus one or two serials from popular novelists with fiction listed at the top of its contents page. Early British Harper’s Bazaar printed four items of fiction per issue on average, relying on stories and serials by well-established writers to help establish its literary credentials. Eve’s weekly issues usually contained one or two short stories, sometimes a serial, with a higher proportion of fiction and articles from household names in the annual bumper Christmas number. Genre fiction abounded across Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar. Rags-to-riches stories, romance fiction, detective stories, and weird tales were common. ‘British culture in the early twentieth century was marked by an intensified concern about reading’, Patrick Collier records, ‘about the future of print culture and its political and social consequences’.6 This concern was infused by a long-standing ‘struggle between literature and journalism’, which, as Laurel Brake has explored, saw periodicals and their articles devalued and ‘subjugated’ in the late nineteenth century.7 ‘As the common wisdom held’, Collier writes, ‘newspapers were impoverishing public discourse’ and making readers ‘intellectually lazy’.8 In an article published, ironically, in British Vogue, Max Eastman, editor of radical Greenwich Village magazine The Masses, similarly condemned commercial magazine writing in 1916.9 ‘Magazine literature contains no accidents’, he complained: It takes no chances. It is never cracked up the middle. It is never fragmentary. […] It is never queer; it is never grotesque; never alien, or exaggerated, or sublime. It has always the professional finish, the smooth round regular decorated mechanical perfection characteristic of all goods that are turned out in large quantities to sell.10 Eastman blames these perceived flaws in commercial magazine articles on the ‘business motive’ to ‘please as many readers as possible, and to offend none’, which dictates that the ‘professional’ magazine writer must strive for ‘obviously “pleasant” qualities, like fluency, and wit’ with ‘no difficulties for the understanding’.11 His satirical caricature of the mass-produced periodical article accords with the many assured, bright, companionable essays found in the women’s magazines surveyed in this study, and could be extended to describe the polished and ‘obviously “pleasant” qualities’ of many of their regular columns and fiction, too. This chapter demonstrates, however, that interwar women’s magazines also printed essays and fiction by professional writers who experimented

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  109 within and against these conventions. My analysis is divided into two sections that explore, firstly, subversive articles in Good Housekeeping, and, secondly, short stories in Eve and Harper’s Bazaar that disrupt the familiar romance narratives commonly associated with women’s magazine fiction. Vogue is omitted from this chapter because the magazine published almost no fiction and did not routinely print signed essays in the interwar years. The women writers selected for discussion – Jameson, Macaulay, Bowen, Hall, Sackville-West, and Woolf – are described variously by today’s critics as modern, middlebrow, and modernist, and often read differently and apart from one another through these critical lenses according to how they are categorized. In contrast, I read across a sample of their contributions to Good Housekeeping, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar in the context of wider movements of feminist resistance and textual play in circulation in these commercial women’s periodicals.

Dissident Voices in Good Housekeeping: Rose Macaulay and Storm Jameson In addition to routine service features on cooking, childcare, and ‘Household Engineering and Housecraft’ (including laundry, cleaning, furnishing, equipping, and maintaining the home), interwar Good Housekeeping published an array of ‘Special Articles’ by well-known writers in each monthly issue. These included informative articles on practical matters (such as Meriel Talbot’s ‘The Prospects Australia Offers to Educated Women’ (November 1924) and Helena Normanton’s ‘Married People and Income Tax’ (June 1929)), impassioned debates of contentious topics (such as Marie Belloc Lowndes’s ‘The Effects of Easy Divorce’ (April 1922) and Violet Bonham Carter’s ‘Democracy in the Melting Pot’ (January 1932)), literary criticism (such as Vera Brittain’s ‘The Somerville School of Novelists’ (April 1929) and monthly book essays by Clemence Dane, Winifred Holtby, and Beatrice Kean Seymour), travel writing (such as Rebecca West’s ‘Impressions of America’ (September 1924) and Richard Aldington’s ‘New England Days’ (May 1936)), and familiar essays on everyday subjects (such as Frank Swinnerton’s ‘Respectability’ (May 1925) and Edith Sitwell’s ‘[Dis]Pleasures of Bickering’ (May 1936)). While the magazine’s routine content and advertising promoted the conservative message that housekeeping and child-rearing were woman’s particular work, a view often endorsed by its fiction, its special articles presented diverse responses to women’s roles, rights, and opportunities, including progressive and radical opinions. Indeed, of the four magazines surveyed in this study, Good Housekeeping was the most overtly socially and politically engaged with a strong feminist undercurrent. As analysis in Chapter 1 has shown, early Good Housekeeping presented a much wider range of perspectives on the position of women

110  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment in society than a twenty-first-century reader might expect. The magazine ran a careers column in the 1920s and early 1930s surveying a wealth of potential occupations for women, including law, engineering, dressmaking, and commercial art.12 Further, Alice Head, as assistant editor and then general editor from 1924, commissioned and printed numerous essays by celebrated women prompting its female readers to engage with politics and social issues. In October 1922, Rebecca West responded to the furore surrounding A. S. M. Hutchinson’s novel This Freedom (1922), which had sparked controversy across the British press due to Hutchinson’s didactic and regressive stance on gender roles, in an essay taking his novel as a starting point for a debate titled: ‘Wives, Mothers, and Homes: Can a Married Woman Have a Career Outside Her Home?’13 In September 1923, Lady Rhondda, founder of feminist weekly Time and Tide, wrote on current challenges facing ‘Women in Business’ asserting that ‘[u]ntil the average man brings his daughter into his office as naturally as he now brings his son, the business woman who desires to work up from the ranks will not get a fair chance’.14 Pioneering feminist Helena Normanton, the first woman to practise as a barrister at the Bar in Britain15 and a regular Good Housekeeping contributor in the 1920s and 1930s, answered the question ‘Do Men Want Women in Politics?’ in a combative essay printed in October 1926 with the conclusion: Men do not want women in politics. Neither do they at the Bar, nor the Stock Exchange, nor on the Episcopal Bench, nor in the priesthood, nor in fact in any seats of authority. It means, for men, too much adjustment for themselves.16 In February 1929, the Labour Party politician Ellen Wilkinson contributed an instructive personal essay on ‘How to Become an M.P.’ Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, as Judy Giles has commented, Good Housekeeping sought to provide women with ‘a forum […] in which rational debate about issues of public concern is carried out’.17 The magazine frequently published articles presenting divergent views on a single topic. In November 1935, for example, a feature titled ‘What is the Main Business of Life?’ comprised two essays by famous authors offering contrary responses to this question: the first, by Vera Brittain, advocating ‘One’s work before family relationships’; the second, by Beatrice Kean Seymour, in favour of ‘A personal life before a professional’.18 Contradictory opinions abounded within and across issues of the magazine. Interwar Good Housekeeping thus provided a receptive space for essays voicing dissident views, including those that challenged gendered roles and values propagated by the dominant domestic narrative of the magazine’s service features. As a sample of this dissident journalism, the following discussion analyses a small selection of subversive articles

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  111 contributed to Good Housekeeping in the 1920s by Rose Macaulay and Storm Jameson, both prominent interwar women writers without independent income who wrote widely for the periodical press. Despite the wealth of now canonical authors who contributed to Good Housekeeping in the 1920s and 1930s, this commercial periodical has been largely overlooked by literary critics.19 The most sustained literary analysis of interwar Good Housekeeping has been directed to Virginia Woolf’s six-essay series in the magazine in 1931–32, later collected as The London Scene (1975; 2004).20 But British Good Housekeeping sought and attracted essays and fiction from a wide range of well-known contributors and, backed by Hearst and in profit from its third issue, was able to pay handsomely for writing by popular and highbrow authors. 21 Woolf, for example, received £50 for each of the six essays she wrote for Good Housekeeping in 1931 (less 10% to her agent); in comparison, in the same period, she was usually paid seven guineas (£7 7s) an article by the New Statesman and Nation and between £28 and £32 15s by the Times Literary Supplement. 22 While a less famous writer no doubt commanded a lower fee, these figures indicate that writing for Good Housekeeping could be a lucrative enterprise. Macaulay’s association with Good Housekeeping began shortly after the launch of the British edition with a series of six light familiar essays on everyday problems: ‘The Problems of Married Life’ (August 1922), ‘The Troubles of a Writer’s Life’ (March 1923), ‘Some Problems of a Woman’s Life’ (August 1923), ‘Some Problems of Social Life’ (October 1923), ‘Problems for the Citizen’ (November 1923), and ‘Problems of a Reader’s Life’ (March 1924). ‘Like Virginia Woolf’, Collier notes, ‘Macaulay was raised to be part of the upper-middle class intelligentsia’, but without inherited wealth she earned her living by writing from 1911 and contributed to a diverse spread of periodicals including ‘the literaryestablishment TLS, the retro-Georgian London Mercury, the Tory Spectator and Socialist New Statesman and Nation, and low-brow daily papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express’.23 She published at least twelve essays in Good Housekeeping between 1922 and 1928, a travel article in Harper’s Bazaar in 1930, and two literary reviews in Eve, where her novel Crewe Train was printed in serial instalments during 1926–27. When Macaulay’s first article appeared in Good Housekeeping in August 1922, she had been accepting regular journalistic commissions from 1920 and had already produced eleven novels, including seven early realist novels categorized by Kate Macdonald as ‘her Georgian period’ and three satirical post-war novels that helped to cultivate Macaulay’s ‘reputation as a “witty” woman writer’. 24 This celebrity is evident by the inclusion of a quarter-page photograph of Macaulay above her first Good Housekeeping contribution (it was not the magazine’s standard practice to include author photographs alongside essays) and an editorial by-line introducing her as the ‘Author of “What Not”,

112  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment “Potterism,” “Dangerous Ages,” etc.’, her three most recent novels, the latter of which brought critical acclaim as well as commercial success by winning the prestigious Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse.25 Sarah Lonsdale describes Macaulay as a professional writer in ‘that hazy and contested zone between highbrow and middlebrow, the intellectual and the popular’. 26 For Macdonald, Macaulay is ‘part of the group of British novelists […] whose writing cannot be categorized solely in terms of a “brow” position, or by their readers or marketing’. 27 Within this group Macdonald also places, among others, Elizabeth Bowen, John Galsworthy, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, W. Somerset Maugham, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Evelyn Waugh, and Rebecca West, all of whom notably published in one or more of the women’s magazines analysed in this book. 28 In the 1920s, Macaulay frequently wrote to an editorial brief in her essays, ‘developing her theme to fit her commission’. 29 As a novelist and a journalist, Macdonald notes, ‘Macaulay navigated commercial success and critical innovation in markets […] in which she needed to succeed to earn a living, yet with whose norms and expectations she did not necessarily agree’.30 Collier has identified one of Macaulay’s characteristic moves in her writing as ‘newspaper and magazine features that satirize their own premises’ as a means of highlighting ‘what struck her as the inanity of much newspaper content’.31 Macaulay reflected humorously on the triviality of many journalistic commissions in an essay published in Good Housekeeping in 1924 titled ‘What the Public Wants’. Contemplating ‘the public as seen, or imagined, by the newspaper and magazine editor’, Macaulay lists a series of topics on which she has been asked to write by editors ‘for the cheaper press’, including ‘Why I Would Not Marry a Curate’ and ‘Should Clever Women Marry?’, and argues that ‘editors are quite wrong’ to believe there is any audience – including women – that ‘want[s] this kind of stuff’.32 This article could be read as a subtle critique on her first Good Housekeeping commission, which also begins with the theme of marriage. Macaulay wrote to her sister on 15 April 1922 with wry amusement that, as an unmarried woman, she had ‘just had to do an article on “The Problems of Married Life”’ for the magazine, noting ‘I had nothing original to say, of course […] they want another five articles on similar subjects’.33 While the title of her first Good Housekeeping article was evidently dictated by the editor, it is difficult to determine whether, or to what extent, Macaulay had input into the selection of topics dealt with in subsequent essays in the series. Either way, she took this commission for six light articles tackling everyday problems, particularly as they affect women, and through witty discussion and intellectual argument subverted the expectations of this familiar essay form by demonstrating that their problems are not difficulties at all. These articles were later reprinted in Macaulay’s first volume of essays, A Casual Commentary (1925), following which their origin in this Good Housekeeping commission seems to have escaped the notice of most subsequent

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  113 biographers and critics. Macdonald contends this demonstrates Macaulay’s success in ‘reframing essays of domestic entertainment aimed at women working in the home into sardonic think-pieces from a worldly commentator’.34 However, I argue, the worldly intellectualism and sardonic humour of Macaulay’s Good Housekeeping essays were also far from out of place within Good Housekeeping, which, as my analysis above shows, commissioned a wealth of intelligent and witty articles from well-known essayists for women working both inside and outside the home, and provided a productive vehicle for Macaulay’s feminist responses to her subject matter. This domestic magazine endeavoured to distinguish itself from other sections of the women’s press by its intelligent responses to women’s lives. Nevertheless, in common with the women’s magazine market as a whole, Good Housekeeping relied on the premise that women require instruction and advice on a range of feminine problems. Macaulay’s dismissal of such perceived difficulties in her Good Housekeeping articles thus disrupts not only the expected format of her problem essays but also the routine content of the magazine in subversive ways. Macaulay’s ‘problem essays’ characteristically use humour to negotiate or diffuse the difficulty or dilemma under discussion. Her first Good Housekeeping article opens with the assertion: ‘How very right and proper it is that the unmarried should be asked to write about the problems of married life!’35 Having no experience of marriage herself, she turns to what ‘the married’ have written on the subject, according to whom, it seems ‘the great and wellnigh insoluble problem is how to be reasonably happy with the partner of your choice’. 36 ‘The unmarried may be inclined to say’, Macaulay drolly retorts, ‘Why choose a partner with whom happiness is such a dubious achievement? Why not select one approximately suited to your requirements, or go without altogether, which seems simple?’37 Macaulay answers the central problem of marriage with the proposal that one might simply not marry. On the other hand, she speculates that those who write on this theme ‘have often more of imagination than of that accuracy of mind necessary for the fair discussion of a subject’.38 She critiques Arnold Bennett’s Our Women (1920), for example, in which ‘[h]is argument is (apparently), men are like this and women are like that; how, then, shall they understand one another’, and she refutes this by contesting his essentialist view of gender.39 Similarly, she criticizes H. G. Wells’s novel Marriage (1912), ‘in which he implies that the trouble often is that the man, an intelligent being, wants to be busy about his life’s work, while the woman, […] an intellectual and moral imbecile, only wants to spend his money and distract his attention’ by arguing: ‘do not marry intellectual and moral imbeciles of either sex. It is really so easy not to’.40 Other perceived problems of married life Macaulay regards as largely imaginary and the result of gendered expectations. ‘You will find them […] set forth in some of those bright and touching columns of chat which adorn the

114  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment Woman’s Page, so called, of much of our daily and weekly press’, she writes, where ‘those authorities who decide what shall interest woman’ decree ‘that she shall be offered (in addition to advice on toilet soaps, cosmetics, garments, and ways of dealing with children and food) hints on how to conduct her courtship and marriage’.41 ‘These hints are, so far as I have observed, based on the assumption that to keep her husband’s regard will be a strenuous and unceasing struggle’, Macaulay notes: ‘She must look fresh, bright, and pretty in the evenings, [. . .] must see that the house is tidy, the food succulent (“tasty” is the Woman’s Page word); in short, she must be a bright little wifie in a cosy little home’.42 Macaulay’s sarcasm extends to the observation that ‘these helpful writers’ regard a wife’s affection as ‘a far more stable business than that of a husband’, since ‘You do not find [these problems] so often on the Pages for Men’.43 This satirical response to the women’s pages of daily and weekly newspapers also, of course, critiques the ideal of the attractive and efficient homemaker presented by Good Housekeeping, but it does not sit so incompatibly within this magazine that alongside domestic advice printed articles offering other possibilities for how women might live their lives. In the August 1922 issue in which Macaulay’s ‘The Problems of Married Life’ was published, Mrs. W. L. Courtney discussed ‘The Right to Work’, asking why following the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 ‘Cambridge persist[s] in refusing degrees to women’ and ‘there [is] still a dead set against the employment of married women, not only in industry, but also in the professions’.44 Meanwhile, the magazine’s careers column showcased ‘Political Work as a Profession for Women’.45 The real difficulty of married life, Macaulay suggests as her article draws towards its close, is when children arrive. ‘It is, altogether, an unfortunate business, this of bringing up and being brought up’, Macaulay muses, ‘[t]hese strange little savages that we all are, without virtue or learning, flung into a world that has to accept us and drag us somehow through our more depraved and foolish years’.46 Read alongside Courtney’s fierce defence of women’s right to work, Macaulay’s comic portrayal of the problem of child-rearing also suggests the greatest difficulty of married life for a woman is how to maintain her identity and way of life after having children in a society which likely denies her a profession and public life after this event. It was a frequent and pertinent debate within Good Housekeeping. Yet, overall, Macaulay’s article suggests that the ‘problems of married life’ are mostly invented by editors and writers hungry for copy or plot, while ‘those who live it seem often to survive unstifled and unthralled’.47 She concludes ‘it seems probable that the problems of married life are over-regarded by theorists and writers, and insufficiently by prospective marriers’, and that if ‘the latter class thought more about them, the former would have the less to say’.48 Her opening up of a space to reject the option of marriage in this article speaks pertinently to Good Housekeeping’s audience, which included

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  115 not only married homemakers and mothers but also unmarried women, as is demonstrated by an instructive article by Helena Normanton in this issue for independent women negotiating a lease on a home.49 In another essay from the series, ‘Some Problems of a Woman’s Life’ (August 1923), Macaulay again capitalizes on the opportunity Good Housekeeping provides to debate women’s experience and to resist the dominant ideology of the magazine’s routine content. Her article satirically laments the ‘tradition’ that ‘has now for long been established that cooking and cleaning are woman’s work’.50 ‘As these occupations are among the most tiresome which humanity has to endure’, she argues, ‘this tradition is very unfortunate for women’. 51 In response, Macaulay mischievously asserts: The only solution of this problem which I can suggest—and I almost hesitate to do so in these pages—is, Do not keep house. Let the house, or flat, go unkept. Let it go to the devil, and see what happens when it has gone there. At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.52 This impassioned statement humorously undercuts the assumption that housework is a valuable and skilled activity, an assumption propagated by Good Housekeeping’s service features and on which its high circulation figures relied. It sits defiantly alongside the ‘expert’ advice provided by Good Housekeeping’s regular Home Management section, beginning on the following page in this issue, which, Macaulay’s article implies, is unnecessary. In common with other essays in Macaulay’s Good Housekeeping series, ‘Some Problems of a Woman’s Life’ subverts the expectations of the ‘problem essay’ form by trivializing the issues it debates. More than any other, it presents feminist resistance to some of the magazine’s core values, notably its idealization of the homemaker and the central premise, crucial to Good Housekeeping and the wider commercial women’s press, that women need instruction to manage every area of their lives. Macaulay turns to the theme of another regular department in Good Housekeeping and ‘[w]hat is commonly supposed to be another problem specifically feminine’, that of ‘Beauty, how to acquire it, or how to retain it’.53 She states that ‘solutions will be found (I expect) among the advertisement columns of this useful magazine’, but herself has ‘no remedy to offer for this distressing and almost universal complaint of Losing the Looks—except, grin and bear it’.54 ‘One article is not enough in which to consider feminine problems at large’, Macaulay concludes: I turn the pages of a recent issue of this magazine, and problems of which I had not thought confront me on every page. How to clean chintzes. Yes, indeed. Why look lined and unlovely? Is your neck

116  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment too fat? Is it too thin? How to prepare hearty meals of eggs. [. . .] How to dress the kiddies, keep the home nice, make your husband comfortable, succeed in business or at the Bar, use your vote, choose a car . . . What a life is this into which we have been flung!55 The list of ‘problems’ tightly accords with Good Housekeeping’s spread of content, from housekeeping to careers, beauty to politics. As Macaulay predicts, the latter half of her article appears alongside an advertisement for a product claiming to help women preserve beauty, Nuctone dye to ‘restore the colour of grey hair’, which asserts ‘Woman’s first duty to herself is to maintain her appearance’.56 Yet, Macaulay’s article ends with the reflection that women are ‘happier to-day’ with greater freedoms than they had forty years ago, and thus suggests that many of the ‘feminine problems’ discussed in this magazine are less of a problem than they seem.57 Macaulay was not alone in her playful use of routine journalistic forms to present dissident positions in Good Housekeeping. Storm Jameson, another prolific interwar novelist traversing the space between middlebrow and modernist, also produced subversive contributions to the magazine. In the early interwar period, she wrote ‘compulsively’ and also worked as an advertising copywriter, a sub-editor of Frederick Thoresby’s socialist weekly The New Commonwealth (1919–21), and London representative of the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf from 1924 to 1928.58 ‘[U]nder the pressure of a modernist paradigm that isolates literature from history and politics’, Catherine Clay observes, Jameson devalued her own journalism in autobiographical narratives despite ‘the pivotal role that journalism played in [her] development as a writer’.59 She wrote for a wide range of periodicals, from modernist ‘little’ magazines The New Age and The Egoist to commercial women’s magazines. Jameson produced at least seven feature articles for Good Housekeeping during the late 1920s and 1930s and contributed twice to the magazine’s careers column, writing on advertising and publishing as careers for women.60 Her short stories were also published in Eve’s Christmas numbers in 1927 and 1928. As Clay attests, ‘Jameson never made feminism a defining aspect of her identity […] or allied herself with a specifically feminist journal, organisation or group’, but she did ‘take a keen interest in social issues as they affected women’.61 I turn now to two of her Good Housekeeping contributions that critique consumer capitalism, a topic of particular pertinence to women as the nation’s chief shoppers in the interwar period.62 In ‘Advertising as a Career for Women’ (August 1928), Jameson’s first contribution to Good Housekeeping’s regular employment series, she subverts the conventions of this monthly column promoting professions in which women might excel. This article draws on her experience of working as a copywriter for the Carlton Agency, an advertising

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  117 firm in Covent Garden, which she did for a year ‘embarrassingly well’ after a failing first marriage and dire financial circumstances compelled her to take this job in late 1918.63 Contributions to Good Housekeeping’s interwar professions series were usually encouraging and instructive in tone, providing useful advice on entry to the career discussed, the skills or training required, the nature of the work and its benefits. Jameson upends the expectations of this feature by instead suggesting that advertising will not be a desirable occupation for most women. It is ‘a career for an unmarried woman, or at least a childless one’, she asserts, which ‘admits of no divided allegiance’.64 She outlines the dominance of men in the profession even though ‘the intellectual qualifications needed are possessed by many intelligent women who drift into the far more crowded profession of journalism’.65 She contends that entry into the profession is difficult since many of the copywriter’s specific skills ‘cannot be acquired outside an actual advertisementwriting firm’ and thus the ‘only way’ a prospective woman advertiser ‘can get into an advertising house (unless she can pull wires) is to go on applying for a job in any of the reputable firms until her persistence is rewarded’.66 According to Jameson, the copywriter requires a number of admirable qualities including the ‘ability to write clear, forceful English’, an ‘infinite capacity for work’, and a ‘head for detail’.67 The job ‘demands taste, a knowledge of human nature that a novelist might envy, and a capacity for clear concentrated writing that few novelists possess’, she explains, but ‘its essential soul is a contract and its heart a money-bag’.68 Rather than encouraging readers to pursue this career path, Jameson seems intent on dissuading women away from it. She humorously describes the experience of the female copywriter producing advertisements for products she does not really endorse: Probably she has never used this soap, never would use it, doesn’t care for it. But her copy must be written as if it were her religion that this soap and none other can—no, infallibly must produce in the user a complexion of dazzling purity.69 While owning that ‘advertising offers an extraordinarily wide and varied field of endeavour to an intelligent woman’ and ‘the rewards’ of this profession are ‘financially attractive’, Jameson concludes ‘it will not be good for her career as an advertising genius, if the thought can find entry into her mind that what she is really doing is playing on the greeds of humanity, and adding to the complications of modern life’.70 The article finishes in the magazine’s back pages, as was usual at this time, and thus her scathing closing comments appear surrounded by advertisements demonstrating the persuasive pen of the copywriter. Jameson’s final reflection that ‘modern advertising is the skilful exploitation—in

118  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment the service of the hucksters—of the hunger to possess, and possess, and possess’ prompts the reader to recognize the seductive hyperbole of neighbouring advertisements claiming Johnson’s Baby Powder is ‘soft as a summer cloud’ and Novio Toilet Paper is ‘Thin / Soft / Strong / & / Silky’.71 ‘Advertising as a Career for Women’ condemns the career it introduces and attacks the consumer capitalism that supported and was promoted by Good Housekeeping, a commercial magazine dependent on advertising revenue. Advertising typically filled a third or more of the magazine’s pages in this period and its editorial footers promised readers, in stark contrast to Jameson’s denunciation of the copywriter’s work, that ‘Advertised Goods are Good Goods’ and ‘All Advertisements in Good Housekeeping are Guaranteed’. In ‘Money is not Happiness’, an illustrated double-page essay printed prominently in Good Housekeeping in March 1929, Jameson extended her criticism of advertising and the consumer’s ‘hunger to possess’. While acknowledging that ‘real poverty is never beautiful or uplifting or anything else but souring to the temper, bad for the body, and depressing to the soul’, she argues that ‘neither is [happiness] to be found by getting and spending every penny we can possibly lay hands on’.72 ‘We remain in cities, working like maniacs to get more money than we need in order to give it to rate collectors, gas men, bus conductors, taxi-men, diary magnates, and peroxide blondes in box-offices’, Jameson contends, because ‘We want what we are told to want. And what we are told to want always costs money’.73 This essay is markedly informed by Jameson’s socialism, developed during her formative years at Leeds University and early association with Orage’s socialist New Age, and portrays the worker/consumer as a passive pawn in the capitalist system.74 ‘The number of costly things without which, according to the columns of the daily, weekly, monthly press, I cannot be a happy and efficient human being, is staggering’, she sarcastically asserts: I need an electric refrigerator, a large ham, some potted vitamins, ten pounds’ worth of beauty lotions (to begin with), bespoke shoes, a fur cloak, a hat or two of distinction, and clothes, clothes, clothes.75 With this extensive list Jameson slyly critiques Good Housekeeping’s insistence on the value of acquiring ever more new and improved commodities, evident in the magazine’s editorial and commercial content. All the goods listed here were the subject of articles or advertisements in the same Good Housekeeping issue in which Jameson’s essay appeared with the exception of the ham, the only food item, and the only good that she identifies as ‘possibly […] really necessary’.76 Meanwhile, the benefits of an electric refrigerator are espoused by four different advertisements in the magazine, including two full-page advertisements for different brands assuring readers that ‘Food kept in a Frigidaire is as fresh and

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  119 pure as ever after days and days’ and ‘Domestic refrigeration is not only a health necessity—it is a definite economy!’77 ‘We all spend more and save less, in proportion to our income, than our fathers did’, Jameson contends, and ‘have forgotten, or are rapidly forgetting, how to be pleased with little things’.78 She speculates that perhaps this is the result of the First World War; ‘Everything looked so safe in 1914 and was actually so terribly unsafe. [. . .] Perhaps better spend while we can and let the future look to itself’.79 Turning her attention to those enticed to buy on credit, she jokes: The time is rapidly approaching when Mrs. Everyman will rise with her husband from the table on which they have paid half the instalments, put on the coat on which she now owes only five more, and, leaving the house for which they are paying the first year’s instalments, go out with him in the car for which the deposit was paid last week.80 In the context of the interwar housing boom, cheap mortgages became readily available in Britain and the increased use of hire-purchase contracts, which Sean O’Connell notes rose by a factor of twenty in Britain in the early twentieth century, allowed middle- and working-class consumers to acquire all kinds of goods – furniture, electrical appliances, cars – previously beyond their reach.81 A Tellus Super Vacuum Cleaner was advertised to Good Housekeeping readers in this March 1929 issue for ‘only 4d. a day’, for example, and an Electrolux refrigerator was recommended with ‘Deferred payments gladly arranged’.82 ‘The system has its advantages’, Jameson wittily asserts, ‘it enables us all to put up a magnificent show on a capital of exactly nothing at all’.83 But it also, she observes, traps households in a perpetual cycle of labour and consumption, forcing individuals to work harder to maintain the materialist lifestyle that fuels, and is fuelled by, consumer capitalism. ‘We multiply our possessions—and remain unsatisfied’, she laments.84 In place of commodity fetishism, which makes people ‘less well off, less happy’, she suggests ‘[t]he whole of our restless, dissatisfied generation’ is in need of ‘the peace of a mind at rest with itself, and time to look at the beauty of a world so soon lost to us’.85 Though the colour of Jameson’s political convictions changed during her life, Jennifer Birkett argues, ‘she never gave up her hatred of capitalist values’ and engaged in ‘fighting the great causes of her day in everything she wrote […] driven by a thirst for social justice and a commitment to freedom’.86 ‘Advertising as a Career for Women’ and ‘Money is not Happiness’ demonstrate these commitments and her hatred of the capitalist values that directed the magazine for which she wrote them. The latter essay closes with a nostalgic vision of the natural world as an escape from the demands of materialism, the persuasive power of

120  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment advertising, and the temptations of consumer credit, all pervasive in Good Housekeeping. ‘When you and I are dead, the sunlight will still fall on the shining trees and the wind bend the grass, but we shall not see it’, Jameson evocatively concludes: ‘Let us look at it now. Let us keep quiet and let the wind and the trees speak’.87 Macaulay and Jameson provide two examples of writers who produced essays for Good Housekeeping offering critical commentary on women’s roles, here as wives, homemakers, readers, workers, and consumers, that clashed with the outlook of its service features. The articles considered above show how Macaulay and Jameson challenged Good Housekeeping’s dominant ideologies of domestic womanhood and consumerism, and subverted the expectations of some of its routine forms. The two writers’ unorthodox approaches to their Good Housekeeping commissions can be interpreted as modernist strategies of resistance to the commercial pressures of the marketplace. Collier has argued, for example, that Macaulay adopted ‘an ironic consciousness, a metajournalistic double-vision’ in her writing ‘that allowed her simultaneously to work within the conventions of mass-market genres and hold them at arm’s length’, a modernist positioning that is also reflected in her ‘problem essays’ for Good Housekeeping.88 Such dissident positions and playfulness with journalistic conventions were not uncommon in the magazine, however, particularly among the contributions of women writers, including those who were not allied with modernism such as Winifred Holtby, whose writing, Clay has argued, ‘nowhere […] register[s] the anxiety or ambivalence about journalism so prevalent among modernist authors’.89 Macaulay’s and Jameson’s subversive articles for Good Housekeeping thus exist within a wider current of feminist experimentalism that flourished in this commercial periodical in the interwar period. By soliciting and printing such contributions, particularly in the 1920s, Good Housekeeping facilitated this kind of experimentation.

Gender Disruptions in Women’s Magazine Fiction Fiction was a central part of the pleasure that most women’s magazines afforded their readers in the interwar period, providing entertainment, distraction, and an imaginative space for women to explore alternatives to their present lives. In her analysis of oral testimonies from women readers of ‘service magazines’ in the 1930s, Fiona Hackney records that ‘[m]ost women associated escapism and pleasurable relaxation with romantic fiction’, and ‘longer serials […] were remembered with particular affection’.90 While Eve and Harper’s Bazaar targeted different readers to the service weeklies and monthlies with which Hackney is concerned, these elite fashion magazines also made fiction a staple of their content and routinely offered the escapist pleasures of romance narratives. Before exploring a selection of experimental stories in these periodicals that

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  121 present alternatives to conventional models of femininity and patriarchal marriage commonly associated with women’s magazine fiction, the second half of this chapter gives an overview of the scope, amount, and types of stories that Eve and Harper’s Bazaar each printed regularly. It reveals that the tensions between modernity and conservatism, nonconformity and orthodoxy, that ran through these magazines in the interwar years were also evident in their fiction, which ranged from formulaic and conventional plots to experimental and subversive narratives. Throughout its decade of publication, 1919–29, Eve usually printed one or two pieces of fiction per issue, primarily short stories with occasional serialized novels such as Stephen McKenna’s The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (serialized in Eve in 1921 and published by Cassell & Co. in 1922) and Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train (serialized in Eve in 1926–27 and published by Collins in 1926). Short stories in Eve were frequently restricted to one or two pages, while serials commanded greater space. From the mid-1920s, the annual Christmas Number included a higher proportion of fiction and feature articles, including eight or more ‘Complete Stories’ of several pages in length. As well as printing contributions by established and emerging writers, Eve also ran competitions inviting readers to submit their own stories for publication. A prize of £100 was offered in May 1921, for example, for ‘an original story of—or under—2000 words’.91 The winning story, ‘At the Toy Mender’s’, printed in the 2 November 1921 issue, was written by A. M. Burrage, a professional writer later known for his ghost stories who had previously published fiction in Eve. Another eleven stories entered to the competition were selected for publication in issues from late 1921 through to early 1922. Regular issues of Eve included a good deal of genre fiction, including romance fiction, detective fiction, and weird tales. ‘The Murder at Heath Court’ by Lucy Beatrice Malleson under the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert, printed in Eve on 3 August 1927, for example, was ‘Number One of a new series of Detective Stories’. Narratives of love and desire, whether fulfilled or unrequited, frequently endorsed the value of marriage. However, the magazine also published a large number of stories that were determinedly modern in their treatment of romance, many exploring and often satirizing the androgynous gender roles and sexual promiscuity that were perceived to be fashionable among the younger generation following the First World War. Marthe Troly-Curtin’s ‘The Ukulele Lovers’, printed in February 1928, for example, presents an unnamed couple at a night club who dance and drink liberally and apparently happily, the young woman ‘incredibly thin, delightfully decadent’ with hair ‘shorn almost to the skin’ and a ‘small cigar’, but the conclusion reveals her longing for traditional courtship and gender roles.92 Eve published almost no fiction by authors who were renowned as modernists (D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Blue Moccasins’ in the 1928 Christmas number is a notable exception), but the magazine printed numerous

122  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment stories that were experimental in their use of narrative conventions, including stories by writers that are today regarded as occupying the disputed territory between modernist and middlebrow, such as Bowen, Jameson, and Macaulay. Eve also contains stories that use literary techniques routinely identified as modernist. A brief fictional sketch that functions as internal advertisement in Eve’s first issue, for example, evokes the interiority of modernist fiction. Titled ‘Aramintha and the Ancients’, this story introduces its title character crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris wearing a ‘smart frock’ and clasping her ‘copy of EVE’.93 Young, beautiful, financially comfortable, fashion-conscious, and pleasure-seeking, Aramintha is a humorous caricature of the feminine ideal that Eve imagines its readers will admire and aspire to emulate. As she hurries towards the Champs Elysées to purchase a fur coat seen in Eve, the narrative breaks into free indirect discourse: She wanted THAT COAT! That most gorgeous fur coat! It had haunted her for . . . hours! (Aramintha was accustomed to rapid realisations.) Ever since she had bought the current copy of the paper she carried so preciously and had seen its glossiness and exquisite silhouette in the centre of the furrier’s page she had ardently desired THAT COAT.94 This sudden shift into Aramintha’s thought processes using expressive punctuation, italics, and upper-case letters for emphasis clumsily alludes to the radical narrative techniques associated with the contemporary trend for psychological fiction, thereby demonstrating the magazine’s modernity. The use of such techniques in texts that, without being modernist, were inventive in form indicates the close interplay between modernism and other kinds of narrative experiment within Eve and, more broadly, within interwar culture. Eve printed a good number of stories that experiment freely with genre in ways that were intended to be perceived as modern.95 Harper’s Bazaar, in contrast to Eve, proudly published texts by overtly modernist authors who were moving into the mainstream in the 1930s, including fiction by Virginia Woolf, to be discussed shortly, and Gertrude Stein, discussed in Chapter 4. Modernist writing comprised only a tiny portion of the magazine’s fiction, however, during a period in which fiction occupied a prominent position in this large monthly periodical with literary aspirations. Early issues of Harper’s Bazaar contained four or five items of fiction, including short stories and serialized novels, many from well-known authors such as Robert Hitchens, W. Somerset Maugham, Nancy Mitford, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh. Stories were usually illustrated and ranged from short texts of a page or two in length to much longer narratives that ran to five or more pages. Like Eve, the magazine published a lot of genre fiction, such as E. M. Delafield’s “The Bitter-Sweet Phrase: Which caused a Headache

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  123 and cured a Heartache’, and Isa Glenn’s ‘The Penthouse: A Hair-raising Ghost Story’, both in the January 1930 issue.96 Harper’s Bazaar also printed fiction depicting, and frequently lampooning, the loosening sexual mores and carefree extravagance associated with the younger generation of post-war socialites who became known as the ‘Bright Young Things’. Examples include Waugh’s short story ‘The Hire-Purchase Marriage, an Inconsequent Version of the Love-in-a-Cottage Myth’ (December 1929), which became the fifth chapter of his novel Vile Bodies (1930), and Nancy Hoyt’s Cupboard Love (1931), serialized in the magazine as ‘a Crisp, Sparkling Novel of the Bright Young People of Park Avenue and a Devastating Intruder from the Old Country’.97 As a transatlantic publisher, Hearst could afford to commission some of the most popular British and American writers of the day. Fiction often appeared in both British and American editions of Harper’s Bazaar, but there are also notable examples of stories that appeared only in the British edition (such as Stein’s ‘Left to Right’ (September 1931)). Early Harper’s Bazaar specialized in amusing narrative experiments that were distinctly modern in subject or style. In March 1931, John van Druten contributed two short stories parodying the work of contemporary authors: the first, ‘Parisian Interlude’, humorously imagines the result of a collaboration between Anita Loos and John Galsworthy; the second, ‘Vile Babies’, comically fuses Waugh’s prose style with the distinctive narrative voice of A. A. Milne in his stories of Winniethe-Pooh.98 In November 1934, K. K. Bowker’s ‘Are you Aboard?’, a skit that is part advertorial, part story, part prose-poem, was printed across a double-page spread bearing a streamlined, minimalist art deco illustration of a cruise ship, with the text positioned in two sloped columns within its red funnels. ‘When you simply can’t face yourself in the mirror a-mornings: when you feel like a piece of toast on which a poached egg has lingered and grown cold’, Bowker’s text begins, ‘Clutch at the telephone with your clammy hand. Order yourself a dozen new countries on appro […] It’s a cruise!’99 The second paragraph repeats the format of the first in a manner that suggests a poem or song (it begins ‘When you feel your toes tingling’ and ends again with ‘It’s a cruise!’), before the text shifts into erratic narrative: Inside, it’s a hurricane pudding, undergoing a seaworthy stir. […] Fat women in sables […]. Plump men baying about in houndstooth-check ulsters . . . leaping lads already in flannels . . . tall men with lean faces. […] Stewards, boys, telegrams, letters, last-minute friends. . . . “ALL VISITORS ASHORE!” Dash to the side. Snatch a place near the rail. Somebody waves across your shoulder. Bumps your bouquet. Apologises. Your eyes meet in the expectant appraisal that may mean—anything—for the future. The ship’s away!100

124  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment This piling up of short statements, fragments, and ellipses playfully evokes both the language of advertising copy and the radical textual forms of modernist poetry and fiction in a text that combines these discourses as well as imitating the high-spirited refrains of a contemporary revue. ‘Are you Aboard?’ concludes within three pages of advertisements from cruising companies towards the back of Harper’s Bazaar, including a ‘Cruising Diary’ listing details of available itineraries and fares, and it was presumably to draw readers to this commercial material that Bowker’s piece was commissioned. Such examples of narrative play reflect the wider experimental ethos of Harper’s Bazaar at this time, which was intimately bound to its commercialism and evident in the magazine’s innovative visual content, fashion reports written as telegrams, and novel page layouts including eye-catching arrangements of text, such as a list laid out to echo the line of a female silhouette in the April 1938 issue.101 The authors of The British Short Story (2011) identify the origins of the modern short story in magazine fiction: ‘it is commercial fiction, made for the marketplace, often as filler material to pad out the editorial matter and occupy the space between advertisements’, they assert, and ‘[t]hat economic fact has a major impact on its aesthetic shaping’.102 A story that is limited in length to just one or two magazine pages must limit its scene setting and character drawing to bare essentials, condense dialogue, and narrow its plot. Much of the short fiction printed in interwar Eve and Harper’s Bazaar reflects ‘the short story’s ephemeral life in periodical publication’, relying on the established conventions and well-trodden narratives of genre fiction to provide momentary entertainment and distraction from everyday life without being particularly remarkable or memorable.103 This is particularly true of Eve, a weekly periodical, in which many short stories are of poor quality and easily forgotten. Fiction in Harper’s Bazaar, an upmarket monthly, included more writing of a higher standard due to Hearst’s ability to pay higher rates and attract more stories from reputable authors. However, as the summary above suggests, there were overlaps in the kinds of fiction in circulation in the two magazines (and some writers published stories in both during the interwar period, including Bowen and Delafield). There are also numerous examples of short stories in each of these magazines that work within the aesthetic and space constraints of periodical fiction to produce narratives that are surprising or compelling. My analysis now considers a small sample.

Radclyffe Hall’s ‘The Scarecrow’, Eve, 19 September 1923 Radclyffe Hall’s ‘The Scarecrow’ was published in Eve in September 1923. Ostensibly a ghost story, ‘The Scarecrow’ follows in the tradition of nineteenth-century supernatural and weird tales exploring Victorian preoccupations with spiritualism and madness as well as cultural

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  125 anxieties about changing gender relations and female sexuality—all themes picked up by this genre-blending narrative. Hall’s reputation as a writer rests chiefly on The Well of Loneliness (1928), famous for the obscenity trial prompted by its lesbian subject matter, though she was the author of a wide body of work including a volume of short stories, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1934). ‘The Scarecrow’ was her only contribution to Eve and occupies two pages in a regular weekly issue.104 This gothic fable depicts the spirit of a vagabond poet, who died friendless and alone, trapped in the physical form of a scarecrow that has been dressed in his coat and hat. In life, the poet was said to be mad, the narrative tells us, because he was ‘always friendly to beasts and birds’.105 Ostracized by his community, he sought solace in nature and the company of animals and birds before dying from starvation while sheltering in a barn. After death, the scarecrow/poet continues to speak to passing creatures – a field mouse, an owl, and a rabbit – and is visited by a young girl, daughter of the owner of the barn in which he died, who also befriends animals and is threatened with incarceration by her father and the doctor due to madness. The theme of imprisonment runs throughout the narrative, from the scarecrow/poet’s opening declaration that he ‘can feel but […] cannot move’, to the rabbit caught in a snare, a sheep dog who is ‘always chained’, and the girl who fears ‘they will lock [her] away’.106 The story emphasizes the liberating power of nature and draws attention to society’s cruel treatment of non-conforming individuals and the pervasive social forces that stifle creativity, emotional, and intellectual freedom. ‘The Scarecrow’ interacts in interesting ways with the surrounding content of Eve in which freedom was perceived as central to new models of femininity, whether in relation to new modes of courtship, new rights to the vote, education, and entry into the professions, or the introduction of less physically restrictive styles of dress. A few pages away from Hall’s story with its description of a young girl who has ‘always been free as the air’ and would have walked into a lake the preceding day ‘with flowers in [her] hair, and no clothes on [her] body except this cloak’, Eve prints photographs of the American Muriel Abbott dancers in short, loose, light-weight dresses ‘taking an early morning dose of joie de vivre’ on the beach.107 The young women move freely on the sand and in the water, throwing balls and pulling a fishing net, and parallel other images of young female dancers at play or holding graceful poses in nature featured in Eve and British Vogue in this period, during which the natural movement in contemporary dance – epitomized by the style of Margaret Morris and Raymond and Isadora Duncan – was frequently held to exemplify the new physical, intellectual, and sexual freedoms associated with modern femininity.108 Yet, elsewhere, Eve’s portrayal of what its editor termed ‘the open-air life’ was inherently bound to more conservative values.109 An image inset within the second page of

126  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment ‘The Scarecrow’ shows four women on a riverbank, dressed stylishly in country suits as they pose facing the camera. This photograph, like Eve’s many society snapshots, seems to offer a glimpse into the carefree private lives of its subjects, but its caption emphasizes that their public social role, defined by aristocratic title, parentage, marriage, or ownership of property (‘Miss Viola Meeking’, for example, ‘owns Richings Park in Buckinghamshire’), underpins their value and remains ever important.110 The elevated description of the women’s activity in this photograph as ‘fishing operations’ further reflects Eve’s framing of leisure as a formalized, professional occupation for the wealthy, which conveys the extent to which, within the confines of polite society, an individual’s interactions and conduct, even at rest or play in nature, are not free but are structured by rigid codes of behaviour. ‘The Scarecrow’ implicitly condemns these rigid social codes through its sympathetic treatment of the poet and the girl who visits him. Jana Funke has observed that Hall’s short fiction ‘covers much ground in terms of style and genre’, combining elements of realism, fantasy, fable, and the gothic, while maintaining a focus on ‘outsiders and outcasts, lost and lonely individuals looking for meaning and purpose and striving for a sense of connection and belonging in the world’.111 ‘The Scarecrow’ depicts two outsiders characterized by their imagination, instinctive affinity with nature, and child-like compassion for animals, which those around them perceive as madness. However, in Hall’s story, animals talk back, answering the scarecrow/poet when he asks first the field mouse and then the owl, before finally the girl, whether they know him and can tell me ‘who I am’.112 This use of patterning and repetition and the presence of talking animals evokes several narrative genres – a religious fable, children’s story, or fairy tale – while the text also brings ‘the barriers between the known and the unknown’ to ‘the brink of collapse’ in a manner typical of the gothic uncanny.113 The scarecrow’s face takes on the physical characteristics of the poet, with his cheeks ‘sunken as though from hunger’ and ‘his blue eyes […] cloudy from many dreams’, to such an extent that a passing doctor who attended the poet’s body exclaims ‘By God! that scarecrow looks real […] I thought, I thought—but it must have been the moonlight’.114 The girl escapes incarceration at the end of the story only through death. Addressing the scarecrow as her ‘beloved’, she begs him: ‘take me away […] to the place where you go when the moon sets, to the place where no one is mad or sane, or angry or cruel, or sorrowful, any more’.115 Funke has described this story’s ending as ‘a reconciliatory Christian salvation narrative’ informed by Hall’s subversive Catholic belief.116 The girl lifts her hair to the scarecrow/poet’s cheek and ‘command[s]’ him to look into her eyes, whereupon, perceiving God there, he is momentarily ‘made whole’ and takes her in his arms, leaving her body to be found ‘dead on the ground, at the foot of a scarecrow’.117 From one

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  127 angle, this conclusion reads as a tragic romance of two thwarted lovers united by death, but its alignment of female agency and sexuality with the divine is highly unorthodox. The girl herself seemingly occasions her own and the poet’s salvation, acting as a conduit for God through the awakening and assertion of her desire for the poet. Evoking the macabre and the sublime, instinct, imagination, and the power of nature, ‘The Scarecrow’ owes much to the eighteenth-century gothic, which is here fused with a religious vindication of the individual’s right to freedom of thought, emotion, and sexual expression in a manner that is as strikingly modern as the story’s blending of narrative genres.

Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Making Arrangements’, Eve, 20 November 1925 Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Making Arrangements’, printed in Eve in November 1925, likewise evokes the gothic. This dark portrayal of marital relations was one of seven stories in Eve’s 1925 Christmas number and appeared first, with top billing, as a ‘finely drawn character study […] brimful of atmosphere’.118 Bowen had yet to publish a novel in 1925, but had published her first collection of short fiction in 1923 and was writing and sending stories to a range of periodicals, including the Spectator, the London Mercury, and Queen, with limited success at this time.119 Later in the interwar period, she would also publish at least one story in Harper’s Bazaar.120 ‘Making Arrangements’ was the first of her three stories accepted by Eve and upends the plot of conventional romance fiction by depicting the dissolution of a marriage. At its opening, it reads as a satire of female promiscuity, modern attitudes to marriage, and the perceived threat to monogamy from loosening sexual mores and post-war divorce reform. It begins in a comic vein depicting a married couple who have found themselves ill-suited in temperament. The husband, Hewson Blair, excels at dealing with practical details, while his wife Margery is flighty and amusing. The story opens six days after Margery has blithely left Hewson for ‘a young man’ called Leslie, and she now writes to her husband requesting that he ‘make all arrangements, […] like getting the divorce and sending [her] clothes on’.121 The humorous letter is written in a light, careless tone that assumes Hewson’s cooperation, secure in the knowledge that he will ‘manage it all beautifully’.122 If our sympathies are initially directed to the cuckolded husband wronged by his narcissistic wife, this allegiance is soon challenged as the story unravels. ‘Hewson never conceived or imagined, but he intended’, the narrator explains, and Hewson had chosen Margery because ‘he had always intended to marry an amusing wife—a pretty little thing with charm’ that would be ‘becoming to him’.123 Brief flashbacks to their life together reveal the lack of affinity between them. Hewson is preoccupied with his social status and the good opinion of others, far above the emotional life of

128  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment himself or his wife. Indeed, Hewson is so unaccustomed to emotion that in the days following Margery’s departure he does feel himself to be ‘sorrowful, venomous, or angry’, but busies himself with making new arrangements for his housekeeping.124 This equanimity ends, however, when Hewson enters his wife’s bedroom to select her clothes for packing and the story takes a gothic turn. Opening his estranged wife’s wardrobe door, Hewson is startled as ‘[f]rom the dusk within, cedar-scented and cavernous, Margery leapt out at him’.125 Haunted by her presence while surrounded by her things, he snatches one of Margery’s dresses from the wardrobe and, apparently inexplicably, tears it. Only when Hewson anticipates her anger at the torn dress does he begin to feel his own fury. After ripping the dress ‘effortlessly from throat to hem’, he looks down at all her dresses laid out before him and imagines they possess ‘the irrepressible palpitation of that vitality she had infused into them’.126 The intense description that follows of Hewson’s interactions with his wife’s dresses suggests both bodily violence and a sexual encounter. As the clothes ‘lay there dormant’, he ‘bent and touched’ and ‘brought down his two outspread hands slowly’, turning his attention ‘with dilated eyes’ to a dress that ‘lay stretched out and provocative and did not resist him’.127 Hewson’s simultaneous desire to touch the dresses and to ‘crush, and crush, and crush’ them is evidently fuelled by repressed emotion and suggests the complex interplay between power, control, and sexual violence.128 Usually acting only with intention, Hewson loses command of himself as he attempts to reassert his authority over his absent wife through the symbolic destruction of her clothes. His actions, we are to understand, and perhaps also Margery’s departure, stem from flawed expectations of marriage, the suppression of feeling and desire, and ultimately, the (thwarted) patriarchal desire to dominate his wife. Depicted largely from the perspective of her deserted husband and through her facetious letter, Margery is a caricature who parallels the many empty-headed, flirtatious heroines found in stories in Eve and other magazines at this time satirizing casual pre-marital or extra-marital relationships. She represents unrestrained female desire, both through her departure with Leslie and her extravagant and costly taste in clothes, while Hewson represents patriarchal anxiety about female sexuality and agency. It is no coincidence that the first dress he rips is red. As the story progresses and shifts focus and mood, the real flesh-and-blood Margery is entirely substituted by a spectre: the phantom Margery who leaps from the wardrobe and whose spirit infuses her clothes, including the ‘flame-colour’ dress Hewson lays down ‘like a corpse’ and the ‘creamy, slithering thing […] that slipped down into his hands with a horrible wanton willingness’.129 Diana Wallace has argued that the ghost story form, including uncanny short fiction by Bowen and May Sinclair, ‘has allowed women writers […] to offer critiques of male power and sexuality

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  129 which are often more radical than those in more realist genres’.130 While not a ghost story in a traditional sense, ‘Making Arrangements’ evokes the supernatural to explore Hewson’s psychological state and to suggest ‘deep-rooted female fears about women’s powerlessness and imprisonment within patriarchy’.131 The story resonates with tensions in the portrayal of women across Eve weekly issues, which, on the one hand, frequently celebrated women’s independent achievements – as writers, actresses, artists, politicians, and sportswomen, etc. – but, on the other, repeatedly positioned married women in the public eye back within the nuclear family where their identity was subjugated to that of their husband. The society frontispiece on the magazine’s internal cover on 4 November 1925, for example, pictures ‘The Hon. Mrs. Calthorpe and her son Ronald’; the photograph emphasizes her role as mother, while the caption focuses on her husband, a cricketer and ‘Lord Calthorpe’s only son’, who ‘made a lot of runs for his county last summer’ and ‘is captaining the XI which is shortly leaving for the West Indies’.132 Eve’s society pages routinely defined aristocratic or celebrity women through their husband’s identity, property, or achievements. These tensions were not unique to Eve, of course, but were playing out across many women’s magazines of the era in response to women’s slowly increasing rights and opportunities in public life at a time when, nonetheless, ‘many middle-class women believed that identity and satisfaction could be gained from their roles as wife, mother, and mistress of a home’.133 ‘Making Arrangements’ disturbs this belief and conventional models of femininity through the figure of Margery, who, though satirized and transformed into a gothic spectre, ultimately escapes her tyrannical husband. By its close, Bowen’s sardonic narrative supplies a robust critique of middle-class repression and the patriarchal construct of marriage as the ownership of woman and a practical arrangement through which to gain or maintain social status or to consolidate wealth. It also, more darkly, depicts both the physical threat that patriarchy presents to women and its destructive impact on the psychology of men.

Virginia Woolf’s ‘In the Looking Glass’, Harper’s Bazaar, January 1930 Virginia Woolf contributed to a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including all four women’s magazines surveyed in this study as will be detailed in Chapter 4. She was a prolific reviewer and essayist as well as a novelist and also wrote short fiction intermittently throughout her writing life. Susan Dick notes that Woolf’s short stories were ‘often a testing ground where she experimented with narrative techniques that she would use and develop future in her longer fictions’, or written as ‘a way of relaxing, or of amusing herself’.134 In the 1930s, she published

130  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment four short stories in the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar. The first, ‘In the Looking Glass’, initially appeared in the American monthly Harper’s Magazine in December 1929 before being reprinted as one of five items of fiction in the third issue of British Harper’s Bazaar in January 1930.135 This brief modernist sketch replaces plot with interiority and, like many of Woolf’s short stories, ‘is not really a story at all’.136 It was first drafted in May 1929 while Woolf was struggling to begin the novel that would later become The Waves (1931) and contemplating the challenge of structuring a narrative through ‘scenes’.137 Within Harper’s Bazaar, where Woolf’s name appeared on the cover at the top of a list of featured contributors, the story’s value is determined by its celebrity author and its experimentalism. P. Joyce Reynolds, editor of the newly launched British Harper’s Bazaar, exploits the high cultural capital associated with Woolf’s experimental writing as part of the magazine’s project to create an elite women’s monthly directed to a culturally sophisticated readership. The contents page subtitles the story ‘A Phantasy of Fugitive Dreams’, while an editorial header above the text asks: ‘Am I dreaming thoughts or thinking dreams?’ (See Figure 4.3 in Chapter 4 for an image of the text in the magazine).138 These mystifying captions evoke the story’s psychological focus and its lyrical prose, features widely associated with Woolf’s experimental fiction at this point in her career after the publication of Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). ‘In the Looking Glass’ deviates from fiction commonly published in commercial women’s magazines of the period in that it is not plot driven and contains very little action and no dialogue. It is a story about perception, the gulf between impressions and facts, and the difficulty of determining another person’s character. It is also, indirectly, a story about storytelling. The text begins and concludes with the image of a long mirror hanging in the hallway of an empty house. The unnamed narrator describes the interior of a ‘quiet old country room’ and what can be seen from ‘the depths of the sofa’, including the reflection in the mirror’s ‘Italian glass’ of ‘the marble topped table opposite’ and ‘a stretch of the garden beyond’.139 The narrator is located in this scene with a perspective that is frequently limited by the physical space; their view of the ‘long grass path leading between banks of tall flowers’ is ‘slic[ed] off’, for example, by ‘the gold rim’ of the mirror.140 In contrast, Isabella Tyson, ‘the mistress of the house’ and the text’s protagonist, only physically enters the story in the penultimate paragraph when she returns from cutting flowers in the garden and becomes visible in the hallway looking glass.141 The bulk of the story comprises the narrator’s extended musings on the character of Isabella, a wealthy woman ‘of fifty-five or sixty’, and ‘how very little, after all these years, one knew about her’.142 The narrator looks first to ‘facts’ to establish ‘the truth’ about Isabella – ‘that she was a spinster; that she was rich’, that she ‘had known many people;

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  131 had had many friends’ – before turning to ‘imagination’ as a ‘tool’ to ‘prise her open’.143 ‘One must fix one’s mind upon her at that very moment’, the narrative asserts, with a directive that echoes Woolf’s earlier reflections on drawing character in fiction in essays such as ‘Modern Novels’ (1919) and Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924).144 The descriptions of Isabella remain speculative until she emerges ‘larger and larger in the looking glass’, coming up the garden path ‘so gradually that she did not seem to derange the pattern in the glass, but only to bring in some new element which gently moved and altered the other objects as if asking them, courteously, to make room for them’.145 This painterly description of Isabella’s effect on the scene in the mirror suggests artistic, and by extension, narrative composition and the writer’s arrangement of character and scene. Standing before the mirror at the story’s close, Isabella is finally exposed by its ‘pitiless light’.146 The looking glass strips away ‘the unessential and superficial’ to ‘leave only the truth’.147 The ‘mask-like indifference of her face’, which was previously thought to conceal ‘twenty times more of passion and experience that those whose loves are trumpeted forth for all the world to hear’, disintegrates and she appears simply ‘old and angular and veined and lined’ with ‘no thoughts’ and ‘no friends’.148 The letters on the hallway table, previously thought to be ‘thick with meaning’, are revealed to be only bills.149 This anticlimactic epiphany undercuts the text’s earlier framing of Isabella as a thwarted romantic heroine whose cabinet drawers are full of ‘long letters of intimacy and affection’, ‘violent letters of jealousy and reproach’, and ‘terrible final words of parting’.150 When read within Harper’s Bazaar, ‘In the Looking Glass’ also delivers an oblique critique of the leisured, fashionable lifestyle idealized by this magazine and epitomized by Isabella, who is ‘rich’, ‘distinguished’, well-travelled, a collector of distinctive and costly furnishings, with ‘many friends’ and ample time to idly tend her garden.151 Without the surface trappings of wealth – her expensive possessions and ‘exquisite’ clothes and shoes – Isabella is found to be ‘perfectly empty’.152 However, the editorial framing of Woolf’s story in Harper’s Bazaar entirely sidesteps this potential clash with the magazine’s outlook. Instead, it is packaged and sold to readers as a high-cultural commodity that delivers a taste of modernist experimentalism. Through contact with Woolf’s fiction, the magazine’s audience is paradoxically offered the opportunity to cultivate the same superficial cultural sophistication that Woolf critiques with her portrait of Isabella.

Vita Sackville-West’s ‘Liberty’, Harper’s Bazaar, October 1930 Early Harper’s Bazaar also printed non-modernist forms of fictional experiment. In October 1930, the magazine printed Vita Sackville-West’s

132  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment short story ‘Liberty’, her third contribution to the magazine in 1930 following two previous essays on holidaying in France.153 An aristocrat as well as a successful writer, Sackville-West was a desirable celebrity contributor for elite British fashion periodicals. She produced signed essays and book reviews for Todd’s Vogue in the 1920s and fiction and travel writing for Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s, which also serialized her novel Family History (1932). ‘Liberty’ is notable in challenging the heteronormative values of women’s magazines’ romantic fiction through a homoerotic subplot. It was given a double-page in Harper’s Bazaar with a large central illustration by the British painter Steven Spurrier that suggests a melodramatic tale of frustrated desire. An attractive young woman stands between two men: one kneeling before her and gazing up with a look of desperation and longing while clutching a rifle; the other standing behind her against a dark background, an artist’s palette in hand, his open robe revealing a bare chest as he looms menacingly over her. The text’s dialogue-led narrative and evocative prose also fit within this familiar genre, but the relationships it presents are far from conventional. ‘Liberty’ focuses on a short-lived, passionate affair between Ruth, a married woman, and David, a single man, who ‘have been lovers for seven weeks’ at the story’s opening.154 As her biographer Victoria Glendinning outlines, this text was first written in July 1928 and draws on Sackville-West’s extramarital relationship with Mary Campbell during the preceding year.155 The two women had met in May 1927 in the post office of Sevenoaks Weald, the village in which Sackville-West then lived with her husband Harold Nicolson, and in which Mary Campbell and her husband Roy Campbell, the South African poet, had rented a house while he tried to establish his career in England. In September 1927, Mary Campbell and Sackville-West became lovers and her husband Roy learnt of the affair in November 1927. In ‘Liberty’, Ruth’s husband Paul and her lover David – a name used by Sackville-West within another lesbian relationship in 1928 – are painters rather than writers.156 The story is told by an omniscient narrator, but follows the perspective of David and reflects an artist’s attention to the visual in descriptions of Ruth’s ‘slender body like an Indian girl’s’ and Paul’s ‘beautiful face, so pale as to be almost unearthly, with strange pale eyes rimmed with black, and a strong sensitive mouth’.157 Glendinning observes the strong bond between Paul and his wife’s lover David in ‘Liberty’ and connects this to Sackville-West’s ‘strong fellow-feeling’ for Roy Campbell following his violent reaction to his wife’s infidelity.158 On learning of his wife’s affair Roy Campbell’s first response was ‘quite amicable’, Glendinning records, citing Sackville-West’s diary, but later that evening he ‘went for her [. . .] with a knife’ and ‘kept Mary up practically all night with threats of murder, suicide etc.’.159 By October 1927, these threats of violence had subsided and for a while the relationship between Mary and

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  133 Sackville-West continued, subject to ‘certain arrangements’ agreed with Roy, who was himself having an affair with another woman, before it finally drew to a close when the Campbells moved to France in June 1928.160 The husband in the story, in contrast, shoots himself where Roy Campbell only threatened suicide. Like Roy Campbell, Paul professes to believe in sexual ‘liberty’ and, having married Ruth ‘on that understanding’, at first pledges on learning of her affair to ‘practise what I preach’ and allow the lovers to spend time together.161 However, almost immediately, he is tortured by jealousy and threatens his wife ‘with the chopper’ and subsequently kills himself.162 At the close of the story, David and Ruth, distraught by Paul’s actions, can no longer pursue their relationship and are left apart and lonely. Read on this level, despite its unusually frank discussion of open sexual relations, ‘Liberty’ maintains a conservative façade. It toys with the possibility of disrupting the restrictions of patriarchal marriage, but ultimately its climax and conclusion demonstrate the failure of sexual liberation and endorse monogamy. Thus, Glendinning characterizes it as a story of ‘two lovers who are so humbled and shamed by the nobility of the wronged husband that they decide to part’.163 Yet, beneath this main plot, lies a much more subversive covert exploration of unspoken homosexual love. The narrator’s descriptions of David’s fellow-feeling for Paul are charged with suppressed emotion. ‘He liked Paul very much indeed’, we are told, ‘not only did he enjoy the exchange of ideas with so remarkable an intelligence, but he found an extraordinary fascination in watching the other man’s face, as, lit up by enthusiasm, interest, or indignation, it glowed out of the shadows by David’s evening fire’.164 The narrator’s insight into David’s strong attachment to Paul is limited by David’s own ignorance about his feelings. The emphasis on Paul’s intelligence suggests the intellectual nature of his appeal to David, who delights in Paul’s features describing them as ‘the face of a saint, thought David, the face of a poet’ as if to cast his physical attraction as a purely spiritual or artistic affinity.165 Nevertheless, the narrative discloses the possibility of a buried, subconscious element to David’s jealousy of Ruth’s married life. He is ‘lashed [. . .] into fury and despair’ when Ruth tells him how beautiful her husband is undressed with ‘skin [. . .] as white as a woman’s’, or how ‘Paul, after bathing, would come out of the sea and gallop naked on his pony across the sands’.166 ‘David would either make some sarcastic comment or else, forcing himself to generosity, would add his tribute to Paul’s genius or his romantic looks’, we are told, ‘but he knew that neither expression accurately conveyed the truth’.167 On the surface level of the story, we might assume this singular ‘truth’ is that David is fiercely jealous of Paul’s closeness with Ruth despite his aim to maintain indifference and practise the values of modern sexual freedom. But we do not need to read too closely for the story to open up other possible meanings. The revelation that ‘even

134  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment while [David] was tortured by Ruth’s appreciation, he secretly longed to watch Paul at leisure and feast his eyes upon his beauty’ suggests that it is Ruth’s closeness to Paul and his own suppressed desire for her husband that torments him.168 Sackville-West’s reverse framing of her liaison with Mary Campbell as a heterosexual affair between a married woman and single man allows her to present erotic portrayals of a woman without the censure she anticipated for her ‘unprintable’ sonnets about their relationship.169 ‘You lie against me [. . .] more like a scarf of silk than a woman’, David says to Ruth, for example.170 While not criminalized in law, lesbianism was deeply threatening to heteronormativity in Britain in this period as is demonstrated by the banning of Hall’s Well of Loneliness in 1929 after a high-profile trial in November 1928. Male homosexuality was of course illegal and thus ‘Liberty’ avoids explicit depiction of David’s desire for Ruth’s husband, which is overshadowed by the climatic death of Paul. Instead, Sackville-West experimentally submerges a homosexual subplot within the story, as if closeted and unspoken just like David’s lust for Paul. This queer fictional exploration of alternatives to heterosexual monogamy unsettles the story’s seemingly conservative ending and finds a provocative home in a magazine that routinely celebrated marriage and profiled aristocratic brides and their weddings. Within the same issue that ‘Liberty’ was printed, the society gossip column ‘The Mirror of London’ announced that ‘The Marquis of Waterford and Miss Juliet Lindsay are being married on the 14th at St. George’s, Hanover Square’, for example, while ‘A week later Miss Mary Grenfell, Miss Lindsay’s great friend, is to marry Mr. Geoffrey Waldegrave’.171 Sackville-West’s story subtly challenges the patriarchal idealization of marriage as a foundational building block of society within Harper’s Bazaar and the heteronormative assumptions of most women’s magazine fiction. By publishing this story, Harper’s Bazaar accommodates Sackville-West’s portrayals of contentious and taboo forms of love. ‘Liberty’ enables the magazine to signal its contact with radical modernity while maintaining respectability through its more conservative routine features.

Conclusions Reading across a selection of women’s magazine contributions by prominent women writers, this chapter has shown that interwar Good Housekeeping, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar published not only texts with the ‘regular’, ‘professional finish’ that Eastman condemned in commercial magazine writing, but also texts that were dissident, ‘fragmentary’, experimental, and ‘queer’.172 Professional magazine writers both, Macaulay and Jameson produced essays for Good Housekeeping that work within and against the expectations of commercial women’s magazine journalism. Their articles adopt unorthodox approaches to familiar

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  135 women’s magazine forms (the problem essay, the careers column) and disrupt the consumerist aspirations and domestic ideals propagated by Good Housekeeping’s regular service columns. The short stories read in this chapter from Eve and Harper’s Bazaar likewise upset the formulaic plots and formal expectations of women’s magazine fiction. In the stories analysed above, Hall, Bowen, Woolf, and Sackville-West experiment with blending or breaking conventional narrative forms alongside either critiquing or exploring alternatives to traditional models of femininity. Their fiction is not ‘smooth’ and ‘mechanical’, but can be ‘grotesque’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘cracked up the middle’, or ‘sublime’.173 By reading these essays and stories in the context of the women’s magazines that published them, it is possible to see how the writing of Macaulay, Jameson, Hall, Bowen, Sackville-West, and Woolf in Good Housekeeping, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar deviates from the dominant forms and ideologies of these commercial women’s periodicals. It also, however, reveals that these writers (ranging between modern, modernist, and middlebrow) were not alone in the magazines in producing texts that subvert expectations in this way, and that these magazines facilitated such experiments. Interwar Good Housekeeping contained a persistent strand of feminist debate, which Macaulay and Jameson engaged with and fostered through their subversive contributions to this domestic monthly. The radical narratives of Hall, Bowen, Sackville-West, and Woolf in Eve and Harper’s Bazaar likewise accord with the sustained presence of articles, fiction, and editorial columns in these magazines which, sometimes without drawing on modernist strategies, are nevertheless experimental in form. Though women’s magazines frequently desired distinctions between elite and popular in their commentary on contemporary culture, as argued in Chapters 2 and 4, they also, this chapter demonstrates, put modernism in dialogue with other forms of narrative experiment. The woman writers analysed in this chapter share an interest in challenging mainstream patriarchal, capitalist, and heteronormative outlooks through their writing and, when read in these periodical systems, their contributions to Good Housekeeping, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar can be situated within broader trends of feminist dissidence and narrative play running through these magazines.

Notes 1 Ned Stuckey-French, ‘Humorous Essay’, Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. by Tracy Chevalier (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), pp. 411–13 (p. 412); Dan Roche, ‘Familiar Essay’, in Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. by Tracy Chevalier (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), pp. 274–5 (p. 274). 2 Hilare Belloc, ‘An Essay upon Essays upon Essays’, in One Thing and Another: A Miscellany from His Uncollected Essays, selected by Patrick Cahill (London: Hollis and Carter, 1955), pp. 11–14 (p. 11).

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Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  137

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Pamela L. Caughie, Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature in Question and Question of Itself (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Sonita Sarker, ‘Locating a Native Englishness in Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene’, NWSA Journal, 13.2 (2001), 1–30; Jeanette McVicker, ‘“Six Essays on London Life”: A History of Dispersal’, 2 Parts, Woolf Studies Annual, 9 (2003), 143–65; and Woolf Studies Annual, 10 (2004), 141– 72; Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth, Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). On Woolf’s essays in the context of Good Housekeeping see Alice Wood, ‘Made to Measure: Virginia Woolf in Good Housekeeping Magazine’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 32.1 (2010), 12–24; and Leslie Kathleen Hankins, ‘Picture This: Virginia Woolf in the British Good Housekeeping!? Or Moving Picture This: Woolf’s London Essays and the Cinema’, in Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries, ed. by Julie Vandivere and Megan Hicks (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 76–85. Brian Braithwaite and Joan Barrell, The Business of Women’s Magazines: The Agonies and the Ecstasies (London: Associated Business Press, 1979), p. 12. See Appendix VIII of Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Stuart N. Clarke, V (London: Hogarth, 2009), pp. 663–7. Collier, p. 141. Kate Macdonald, ‘Constructing a Public Persona: Rose Macaulay’s Non-Fiction’, in Rose Macaulay, Gender, and Modernity, ed. by Kate Macdonald (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 118–36 (p. 120). Editorial caption above Rose Macaulay, ‘The Problems of Married Life’, Good Housekeeping, August 1922, p. 17. Sarah Lonsdale, ‘“Imprisoned in a Cage of Print”: Rose Macaulay, Journalism and Gender’, in Rose Macaulay, Gender, and Modernity, ed.by Kate Macdonald (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 57–74 (p. 57). Kate Macdonald, ‘Introduction’, in Rose Macaulay, Gender, and Modernity, ed. by Kate Macdonald (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1–22 (p. 9). Ibid. Macdonald, ‘Constructing a Public Persona’, p. 123. Macdonald, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. Collier, p. 141. Rose Macaulay, ‘What the Public Wants’, Good Housekeeping, July 1924, p. 19. Unpublished letter from Rose Macaulay to Jean Macaulay, cited by Lonsdale, p. 59. Macdonald, ‘Constructing a Public Persona’, p. 121. Macaulay, ‘Problems of Married Life’, p. 17. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 93–4. Mrs. W. L. Courtney, ‘The Right to Work’, Good Housekeeping, August 1922, p. 11.

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Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  139









140  Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment

105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). The text’s prior publication in Eve, however, suggests the possibility that Hall may have published other stories in her lifetime that have yet to be unearthed in lesser-studied periodicals. Radclyffe Hall, ‘The Scarecrow’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 19 September 1923, p. 366. Ibid., pp. 366–7. ‘The Sands of Enchantment’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 19 September 1923, p. 369. See, for example, ‘A Silhouette of Youth’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 4 November 1925, pp. 262–3, a photograph by Fred Daniels of five bare-footed Margaret Morris pupils holding balancing poses in a ‘frieze-like silhouette’ between two trees with the sea and Antibes in the distance. ‘To Our Readers—Old and New’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 2 March 1921, p. 259. ‘Catch as Catch Can’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 19 September 1923, p. 367. Jana Funke, ‘Introduction’, in ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall, ed. by Jana Funke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 1–44 (p. 3). Hall, ‘Scarecrow’, p. 366. David Punter, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, ed. by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 129–36 (p. 130). Hall, ‘Scarecrow’, pp. 366–7. Ibid., p. 367. Funke, ‘Introduction’, p. 16. Hall, ‘Scarecrow’, p. 367. Editorial caption for Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Making Arrangements’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 20 November 1925, p. 4. Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 51. Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Needlecase’ was published in Harper’s Bazaar (June 1939). Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Making Arrangements’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 20 November 1925, p. 5. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 19. Diana Wallace, ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 6.1 (2004), 54–68 (p. 54). Ibid. Internal cover, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 4 November 1925. Giles, p. 114. Susan Dick, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, by Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 1–6 (pp. 3–4). B. J. Kirkpatrick records this text’s publication under the alternative title ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection’ in Harper’s Magazine; see

Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment  141

136 137

138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173

B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 171. Helen Simpson, ‘Introduction’, in A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, by Virginia Woolf, ed. by Susan Dick (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. vii–xiv (p. vii). Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977–84), III (1980), p. 229. Dick records that the first typescript is dated 28 May 1929; see editor’s note in Woolf, Complete Shorter Fiction, p. 299. Editorial billing of Virginia Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, Harper’s Bazaar, January 1930, pp. 5, 43. Virginia Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, Harper’s Bazaar, January 1930, p. 43. Ibid. Ibid., 98. Ibid. Ibid. For these essays, see vol. 3 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (1988). Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, p. 98. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Vita Sackville-West, ‘A Village in French Savoy’, Harper’s Bazaar, February 1930, pp. 38–9, 104; Vita Sackville-West, ‘The Province of Burgundy’, Harper’s Bazaar, July 1930, pp. 34–5, 93. Vita Sackville-West, ‘Liberty’, Harper’s Bazaar, October 1930, p. 44. Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 175–97. Ibid., p. 196. Sackville-West, ‘Liberty’, pp. 44–5. Glendinning, pp. 183, 197. Sackville-West, cited in Glendinning, p. 183. Ibid. Sackville-West, ‘Liberty’, p. 102. Ibid. Glendinning, p. 197 Sackville-West, ‘Liberty’, p. 45. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sackville-West, cited in Glendinning, p. 186. Sackville-West, ‘Liberty’, p. 44. Atlanta, ‘The Mirror of London’, Harper’s Bazaar, October 1930, p. 49. Eastman, p. 77. Ibid.

4

Modernist Reputations

The Early April 1925 issue of Vogue featured a large photographic portrait of T. S. Eliot (Figure 4.1). The image appeared opposite Richard Aldington’s essay ‘T. S. Eliot, Poet and Critic’ and had been taken by photographers Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor who worked extensively for British Vogue from their London studio in the 1920s. In the photograph, Eliot is seated in a dark suit and white shirt with his eyes cast down, away from the camera, towards a large book open on the table in front of him. One hand rests on the page while the other hovers by his chin with a cigarette between the fingers. Eliot is posed stylishly in a moment of thought, musing on the page below him as he smokes. Beneath the photograph, a short editorial profile introduces ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’ as ‘the most distinguished man of letters belonging to the younger generation’.1 ‘His critical essays are notable for their scholarship and impersonality’, the caption explains, and ‘he inclines to bold experiment in his verse’; ‘“The Waste land” is not a poem to be plumbed at one reading’.2 This bordered photograph and its caption together occupy a page following the format of Vogue’s routine full-page portraits of society women appearing in every issue at this time. It was rare for a writer to be given a large photographic profile of this kind in Vogue even during Dorothy Todd’s editorship.3 When images of writers were printed beside reviews of their works, alongside their Vogue contributions, or within the regular feature ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’, they were usually much smaller and inset within the article. The formatting of this photograph, in contrast, elevates Eliot, despite his lack of aristocratic title, to the status of nobility in Vogue – a literary peer of sorts – in recognition of the high cultural value of his works and his image, and in accordance with the magazine’s earlier assertion in its ‘Hall of Fame’ in August 1924 that ‘he has, metaphorically, the highest brow of any man alive’.4 The choice of this photograph to accompany Aldington’s article, rather than another from the same sitting in which Eliot looks directly at the viewer, indicates Todd’s investment in fostering Eliot’s reputation as an elite intellectual uninterested in popular opinion.5 This studio portrait presents Eliot as a serious professional writer averting his eyes from the photographer and the gaze of Vogue’s readers to focus on his

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Figure 4.1 ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’, Vogue, Early April 1925.

work. The image suggests Eliot does not court celebrity, though he must have been invited, and accepted, to sit for this portrait for the magazine.6 Aldington’s reverential essay similarly emphasizes Eliot’s spurning of popular opinion, his highbrow status, and the exclusivity of his works. ‘If he chose to play the game of Fashion he might easily aspire

144  Modernist Reputations to the intellectual dictatorship of Mayfair’, Aldington contends, but ‘[h]e is not known to the crowd; he is not even very widely read by the educated classes’.7 Eliot is framed as a ‘brilliant’ but difficult ‘modern among moderns’ whose writing is marked by ‘intense seriousness (not solemnity)’.8 ‘His poetry carries concentration of thought and economy of expression to the verge—and sometimes over the verge—of difficulty’, Aldington admits, ‘but his originality and intensity of thought and emotion will only be denied by those who have not brains enough to understand them’.9 Eliot was evidently delighted with the essay and its portrayal of him as he wrote twice to Aldington in April 1925 expressing his gratitude to ‘have you for a friend’ and his ‘appreciation of your kindness in writing this article for Vogue’, which, he confessed, ‘says just what I should like to be said’.10 David E. Chinitz has demonstrated both that the perception of Eliot as ‘the human embodiment of high culture’ is a myth and that Eliot ‘himself prepared the grounds for his own misreading’.11 Eliot’s mid-1920s appearances in Vogue show that this magazine also had a stake in cultivating Eliot’s public persona as an isolated highbrow. Chapter 2 has shown that fashion magazines prized exclusivity in relation to modernism as well as dress. Towards the close of this Vogue article, Aldington’s statement that Eliot ‘addresses himself only to superior minds’ sits evocatively beside an advertising slogan reminding readers that ‘Condor Hats being exclusive models are only on sale at the Best Stores’.12 The publication and arrangement of Aldington’s essay and Beck and Macgregor’s portrait in Vogue encourage Eliot’s reception as a difficult, elite, avant-garde intellectual and emphasize the high cultural capital associated with his writing, while simultaneously making him more accessible to the magazine’s readers and implicitly addressing them as those with ‘brains enough’ to appreciate Eliot’s value even if they have not read his works.13 Magazines and print culture are intimately connected with the evolution of celebrity. Leo Braudy’s Frenzy of Renown (1986) traces the history of fame in Western society, identifying the mid-nineteenth century as the moment when ‘the rapid growth of newspapers and magazines, the development of the railroad and the telegraph, along with the rapid sophistication of photography [began] the immense changes in the process of communication that still shape our attitudes toward the famous’.14 ‘Not until the invention of printing was fame untethered from its characteristically short leash’, as Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi observe, and ‘only after 1850, with the emergence of the first mass media, did charisma, celebrity, and fame explode into the kind of phenomena we know today’.15 The emergence of modern celebrity culture is closely tied to the growth of the popular press, rising levels of literacy, and the development of technologies that facilitated the timely production and dissemination of news and images of famous people within and beyond national and continental borders.16 Mass market newspapers and

Modernist Reputations  145 illustrated magazines fuelled and sustained a public appetite for gossip and sensation, which placed successful writers under scrutiny alongside actors, singers, dancers, and (later) film stars, as well as the more traditional idols of royalty and aristocracy. Scholarly accounts of the rise of literary celebrity in Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries highlight the existence of what Loren Glass terms an ‘authorial star system in which the marketable “personalities” of authors were frequently as important as the quality of their literary production’.17 Rod Rosenquist posits that ‘the lesson from celebrity theory is that it takes more than an individual to produce celebrity value’ as a diversity of ‘cultural institutions and audiences – including those who perhaps make no sense of the work of art itself – help to sustain the celebrated aura of the exceptional individual as a public personality’.18 The commercial women’s magazines surveyed in this book did not always make sense of work by the modernist writers and artists they evoked and debated, but they participated in the systems of celebrity that sustained and shaped these modernists’ public personalities nonetheless. In recent years, the materialist turn of the new modernist studies has brought many long-overlooked interactions between modernism and celebrity to light. In Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005), Aaron Jaffe demonstrated that prominent modernists ‘were more canny about fashioning their careers […] than is often appreciated’, influentially arguing that ‘figures like Lewis, Eliot, and Pound mobilized their textual signatures – their authorial imprimaturs – into durable promotional vehicles’.19 Building on Jaffe’s notion of the imprimatur, Jonathan Goldman proposed in Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity (2011) that modernist literary style itself functions as a form of authorial self-fashioning and came to ‘serve as a modified form of the trademark’.20 ‘Once we view modernism’s model of the author alongside the production of popular celebrity’, Jaffe and Goldman contend together in their introduction to Modernist Star Maps (2010), ‘we can conceptualize the relationship between these supposedly divergent spheres of culture as more of a collaboration than a parting of the ways of cultural production’. 21 Karen Leick has explored how Gertrude Stein and other high modernist writers were discussed, parodied, and cited in the mainstream American press during the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that ‘examining the ways popular audiences understood modernism rather than the ways modernists understood popular culture reveals that there was an increasingly intimate exchange between literary modernism and mainstream culture in this period’. 22 Faye Hammill has noted that the exposure given to modernist artists and writers in sophisticated, medium- circulation magazines like Vanity Fair was part of a two-way exchange: ‘the modernists’ growing cultural capital consolidated the smart magazines’ reputations as taste-makers, and allowed them to participate extensively in the making of modernist reputations’. 23 This chapter is informed by these insights

146  Modernist Reputations as it seeks to explore both how individual modernists exploited women’s periodicals to market their work and how these magazines marketed and moulded modernist personalities for their readers’ consumption. Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar all participated in and fuelled systems of celebrity in the interwar period. Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar did so most overtly by printing routine columns of society and celebrity gossip and regular photographic profiles of aristocratic women and stars of stage and screen. In these upmarket fashion magazines photographs of the rich and famous circulated liberally, sometimes with little caption or commentary, in a manner that endowed the images with value irrespective of their subject’s public achievements. Vogue and Eve printed a society frontispiece throughout the 1920s and multiple photo-pages depicting notable personages – aristocrats, actors, writers, dancers, singers, sportsmen and women – engaged in elite leisure activities at home or abroad, such as hunting, skiing, and attending the races. Harper’s Bazaar carried a similar monthly photo-page called ‘The Camera Follows Society’ in the 1930s and a gossip column, initially titled ‘The Mirror of London’ and then ‘Vanity Fair’, the latter written by noted socialite Lady Sibell Lygon. Such extensive society coverage was omitted from Good Housekeeping. This aspirational domestic monthly for ‘intelligent women of the educated class’ celebrated women in the public eye who had succeeded in their chosen field, whether literature, art, politics, or business, but paid far less attention to high society antics, though royalty was frequently idolized in the magazine. 24 Good Housekeeping also regularly printed photographic features on the homes of famous people. Celebrity homes features, often centred on writers, appeared in Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar too and had long been a staple of women’s magazines as Alexis Easley indicates in her discussion of the ‘pervasive image of the writer at home in nineteenth-century print culture’. 25 All four magazines were invested in cultivating and exploiting literary celebrity. This chapter traces how two modernist writers found fame in Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1920s and 1930s. More broadly, it interrogates the ways in which these magazines moulded modernist reputations. Vogue’s presentation of Eliot in the example above not only amplifies his fame but actively shapes his reception as an aloof and superior avant-garde writer. Beck and Macgregor’s photographic portrait, its caption, and Aldington’s article all stress Eliot’s professional identity and literary success, suggesting a traditional model of fame as a reward for achievement, while Vogue as a whole cultivates Eliot’s status as ‘a celebrity’ in ‘the distinctive modern sense’ defined by Daniel J. Boorstin as ‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’. 26 Vogue did not print Eliot’s writing in the 1920s, but nevertheless made him well-known among its audience even if they had not encountered his poetry or prose directly. In the further examples discussed in this

Modernist Reputations  147 chapter, Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar debated the public personalities of modernist authors alongside printing their work. My analysis is divided into two case studies. The first surveys the fluctuating reputations of Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury modernism across Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1920s and 1930s. The second focuses on the reception and portrayal of Stein and the Parisian avant-garde in the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1930s. Alongside exploring the reputations of two individual modernists, this chapter considers the reputations of two sites of modernist production. Both Bloomsbury and Paris were mythologized in print in the interwar period and came to signify avant-gardism, sophistication, and a high cultural social scene. British Vogue’s promotion of modernist writers and artists in the mid-1920s, particularly those associated with Bloomsbury, has been probed by critics, but the wider participation of British women’s magazines in the construction of modernist reputations in the interwar years has not been subject to sustained investigation. This chapter extends this area of enquiry and demonstrates how women’s magazines exploited the cultural cachet associated with high modernist celebrities and their milieu whether satirising or honouring their works.

Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury Modernism in Interwar Women’s Magazines Woolf published in all four magazines surveyed by this book during 1924–39. A prolific literary journalist and essayist, she began writing unsigned book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement from 1905 (with which she maintained a productive relationship until the 1930s), and, as her reputation grew as a novelist in the interwar years, she produced signed essays for a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Nation and Athenaeum and New Statesman and Nation to the New York Herald Tribune and Yale Review. The following discussion explores how Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar cultivated Woolf’s celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s. It attends less to her contributions in the magazines – five essays in Vogue, one essay in Eve, six essays in Good Housekeeping, and four short stories in Harper’s Bazaar – than to her public profile across these commercial periodicals and her responses to writing for them. Extending existing scholarship, I read the reception of Woolf and her Bloomsbury coterie in mid-1920s Vogue alongside her reception in Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar in the late 1920s and 1930s. This chronological analysis highlights the fluctuating reputations of Woolf and Bloomsbury modernism, contrasting the mediation of Woolf’s reputation through Bloomsbury in Vogue with her subsequent rise as a celebrity in her own right. Woolf valued the

148  Modernist Reputations financial rewards and professional validation gained through journalism: ‘Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for’, as she asserted in A Room of One’s Own. 27 She also sought to increase her fame and extend her readership by writing for commercial women’s magazines, while these four titles exploited her high cultural value and increasing celebrity as the interwar years progressed. Early in 1925, following the publication of the first of her five articles for Vogue, Woolf became furiously engaged in a debate with the American essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith regarding the ethics of accepting lucrative commissions to write popular journalism. ‘He says one must write only for the Lit. Supplement and the Nation and Robert Bridges and prestige and posterity and to set a high example’, Woolf reported scornfully in a letter to her friend Jacques Raverat: ‘I say Bunkum. Ladies’ clothes and aristocrats playing golf don’t affect my style; and they would do his a world of good. […] What he wants is prestige: what I want, money’.28 Undoubtedly her first aim in writing for Vogue was financial and Woolf delighted in ‘sweeping guineas off the Vogue counter’, but she also later asserted to Pearsall Smith that ‘Todd’s prices are exactly the same’ as the Nation and Athenaeum, for whom she completed a good deal of reviewing work at this time as Leonard Woolf was literary editor. 29 There were other incentives in writing for Vogue then. In October 1924, alongside delighting that she had ‘asked Todd £10 for 1,000 words’ and would provide ‘4 articles at that fee’, Woolf recorded with glee: Vogue, (via Dadie [Rylands]) is going to take up Mrs Woolf, to boom her: &—&—&— So very likely this time next year I shall be one of those people who are, so father said, in the little circle of London Society which represents the Apostles, I think, on a larger scale. […] To know everyone worth knowing. I can just see what he meant; just imagine being in that position—if women can be.30 In the same year that the Woolfs moved from Richmond to Tavistock Square back in the heart of Bloomsbury, Woolf saw Vogue as a megaphone to amplify her reputation and a route into London’s chic literary and intellectual elite. She was reflecting frequently on her celebrity in the mid-1920s. On 19 April 1925, musing on the forthcoming publication of Mrs Dalloway (1925), she expected ‘a slow silent increase of fame, such has come about, rather miraculously, since J[acob’]s R[oom] was published; my value mounting steadily as a journalist’.31 Her essays for Vogue, brought about through growing links between Todd and Bloomsbury (George “Dadie” Rylands worked for the Hogarth Press in 1924 and wrote copy for Vogue), increased her visibility and net worth as a writer. While Logan Smith feared the dilution and contamination of high culture by mass culture, Woolf viewed his objections as priggish.

Modernist Reputations  149 ‘Todd lets you write what you like, and its [sic.] your own fault if you conform to the stays and the petticoats’, Woolf wrote to him in January 1925: ‘Duncan [Grant’]s argument is that if Bloomsbury has real pearls, they can be scattered anywhere without harm’. 32 Despite her own anxieties about commercialization, she could not resist the opportunity to share in the celebrity that her Bloomsbury contemporaries were then beginning to enjoy in Vogue. Coverage of the Bloomsbury set in Vogue was sparse before Todd’s arrival, but Roger Fry, post-impressionism, and the Omega artists did attract some attention in the magazine prior to 1922. Nicola Luckhurst suggests this attention may reflect ‘a gradual accommodation of public taste to the new art’ or ‘be a consequence of the friendship between Roger Fry and “Champco”’, Vogue’s first editor Elspeth Champcommunal, who visited the Omega Workshop in February 1919 and sought Fry’s help later that year to select paintings by her late husband, Joseph Champcommunal, for a section of Salon d’Automne devoted to artists killed in the First World War.33 Even before this exchange, Vogue published Fry’s article ‘A Possible Domestic Architecture’ in March 1918. This essay outlines Fry’s modernist architectural principles, including a rejection of ‘borrowed style’ in favour of houses that are ‘the direct outcome of [people’s] actual needs’, and the design of Durbins, his home in Guildford, accompanied by photographs of the building’s striking exterior and its functional interiors with decorative fabrics and wall paintings by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Fry.34 Early in 1919, the magazine published two further features on the work of the Omega artists.35 In Late March 1921, a review of modern paintings at the Independent Gallery in Grafton Street singled out Grant for particular praise for his ‘great truth of vision’.36 ‘Where before the war, Bloomsbury’s reputation was as an art-world contingent identified in the press by reference to Fry, the Omega, or Post-Impressionism’, Christopher Reed asserts, ‘in the post-war years, Virginia Woolf’s fiction, Leonard Woolf’s journalism, and the Woolfs’ joint efforts as publishers—combined with Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace—created a broader identity for the group, contextualizing its artists’ output within broader challenges to prevailing norms of interest to a wide public’.37 However, as I traced in Chapter 2, it was only under the direction of Todd from 1922 that Vogue became a sustained promotional vehicle for Bloomsbury artists and writers. Repeated references to Bloomsbury figures within and across issues of Todd’s Vogue helped to cultivate their celebrity and shape their reputation in the magazine. In Late April 1923, Vogue printed a review of ‘The Art of Roger Fry’, presumably by Clive Bell; in Late June 1923, Raymond Mortimer reviewed ‘Duncan Grant at the Independent Gallery’; in Late October 1923, David Garnett contributed an editorial on ‘The Books that Thrill One’ and Mary Hogarth discussed ‘Modern

150  Modernist Reputations Embroidery’ including home furnishings produced by Fry, Grant, and Vanessa Bell. Between 1923 and 1926, in addition to employing Mortimer as literary and theatre critic and Clive Bell as art critic, Vogue solicited contributions from numerous members of the Bloomsbury group, including Fry, Garnett, Leonard Woolf, and Virginia Woolf, as well as printing profiles, essays, or reviews on Grant, Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey. Luckhurst and Jane Garrity have described how Vogue exploited and fostered the high cultural capital associated with Bloomsbury modernism.38 Reed contends the magazine also cultivated Bloomsbury’s reputation for transgressive sexuality, which was amplified by ‘the new culture of sexual nonconformity’ that Vogue came to exemplify under the editorship of Todd.39 This 1920s sexual subculture evolved as ‘substantial numbers of young, well educated men and women—personified by, but hardly limited to, the Sitwells [who also published in Todd’s Vogue]—followed in Bloomsbury’s footsteps by linking “modern” social and aesthetic reforms, to create complex networks of feminists, artists, flappers, and dandies’.40 It was highly performative and androgynous, Reed argues, evident in ‘the extravagant fancy-dress of its parties and its everyday mode of unisex woollen “jumpers” and short hair’, a style that he notes Woolf adopted in the mid-1920s, and in the informality and theatricality of Bloomsbury’s applied arts and domestic interiors, frequently pictured in Vogue photo-features.41 ‘The regular appearance of Bloomsbury members in Vogue—as both the topics and the authors of articles, and as the subjects and makers of images’, Reed poses, ‘identified the group with broad challenges to conventions of sexuality and gender being mounted in the name of modernity’ in the magazine at this time.42 During 1924–26, Woolf sat twice for Vogue’s photographers and published five essays of literary criticism in the magazine: ‘Indiscretions’ (Late November 1924), ‘George Moore’ (Early June 1925), ‘The Tale of Genji’ (Late July 1925), ‘The Life of John Mytton’ (Early March 1926), and ‘A Professor of Life’ (Early May 1926). Her first Vogue appearance was in ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’ in May 1924 (see Figure 4.2). Modelled on the ‘Hall of Fame’ in Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, this photographic feature presented portraits of authors, artists, performers, patrons, and thinkers with captions justifying their inclusion through reference to their achievements. Woolf’s image, taken by Beck and Macgregor, was printed above photographs of the artist and poster designer Edward McKnight Kauffer, the mezzo-soprano Elena Gerhardt, the founder and director of Hampstead’s Everyman Theatre Norman MacDermott, and the literary siblings Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell. Michael Murphy has identified how Vanity Fair’s ‘Hall of Fame’ ‘clearly paid playful tribute to the whimsicality and ephemerality of media-constructed tastes’ and supported the magazine’s exploration of ‘art-as-commodity’.43 Vogue’s ‘Hall of Fame’ likewise recommended

Modernist Reputations  151 literary and arts figures to readers ‘not only in terms of the relative spectacles of their successes […] but even in terms of the facility with which they combined the separate realms of art and business’.44 Thus, Woolf is celebrated, first of all, because ‘she is a publisher with a prose style’.45 Her fame is further justified by her birth (‘because she is a daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen’), her central position within Bloomsbury (‘a sister of Vanessa Bell’), and her literary achievement (‘because she is the author of “The Voyage Out,” “Night and Day”, and “Jacob’s Room”’ and ‘the most brilliant novelist of the younger generation’), before the nomination returns to her role as publisher, concluding that ‘with her husband she runs The Hogarth Press’.46 Brenda R. Silver identifies the importance of images to Woolf’s development as a public figure. ‘[Woolf] allowed herself, however grudgingly, to be photographed by some of the most famous studios and artists of her time’, Silver notes, and her studio portraits of the mid-1920s reflect ‘the growing visibility of her public persona […], occasioned in part by her increasing fame as a novelist and in part by her verbal and visual appearances in Vogue’.47 Silver reads Woolf’s photograph by Beck and Macgregor, in conjunction with the literary reviews she contributed to Vogue, as denoting ‘her association […] with the “intelligentsia”,’ which, Cecil Beaton later commented, ‘was often signified by the “strongly Bohemian atmosphere” of Beck and Macgregor’s portraits’.48 Other commentators on this image and Woolf’s ‘Hall of Fame’ nomination focus on their conservative, nostalgic elements: the caption’s emphasis on Woolf’s status as the daughter of the famed Victorian man-of-letters Sir Leslie Stephen, and her portrait seated, looking demurely away from the camera, wearing an ill-fitting dress with puffed sleeves and lace trimmings that once belonged to her mother. Garrity observes the incongruity of Woolf’s Victorian dress given ‘that Vogue registered every radical shift in fashion in the 1920s’ and posits that ‘the photograph works to signal that Woolf is a modernist who is haunted by her Victorian past’.49 She reads Beck and Macgregor’s direction of this photograph as ‘an intentional allusion’ to a portrait of Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, taken by her great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and later reproduced in Vogue in December 1926.50 The image and the text combine, Garrity contends, with the caption’s emphasis on her ‘literary and ancestral pedigree’ and ‘her role as coeditor of the Hogarth Press’, to ‘situate her in the position of child and wife, firmly within the parameters of Vogue’s heterosexual economy’.51 Reed also interprets this image through the lens of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, reading Woolf’s pose as that of ‘a Cameron model: a Victorian maiden, sitting sedately, her hands clasped before her and hair pulled back, actually wearing one of her mother’s dresses’.52 ‘At the moment she acceded to a position of prominence in her father’s masculine profession’, Reed suggests, ‘Woolf’s public self-presentation asserted her maternal heritage’.53

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Figure 4.2 ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’, Vogue, Late May 1924.

However, within the context of his wider reading of the 1920s sexual subculture of ‘Vogue and the Sitwells, costume parties and camp’, the latter evinced through ‘[t]heatricality, gender-transgression, historical pastiche’, Reed implies the image is coded with nonconformity for Vogue readers attuned to this discourse, and that Woolf’s decision to ‘publish

Modernist Reputations  153 in and be photographed—in Victorian costume, no less—for Vogue’ is indicative of the strength of her growing fascination and identification with this subculture in the year prior to embarking on her affair with the ‘violently Sapphic’ Vita Sackville-West.54 Reed’s interpretation of Woolf’s attire is supported by her previous choice of ‘her mother’s lace-edged dress’ as costume for a Bloomsbury fancy dress party in January 1923.55 In addition, reading this image in the context of the page in Vogue, we find this urban subculture already circulating here through Beck and Macgregor’s portrait of the Sitwell siblings below, with a caption nominating them to the ‘Hall of Fame’ because ‘they have created a new style in prose, poetry and decoration’ and ‘are serious artists who know how to be amusing’ (the word ‘amusing’ and the modern aesthetic it described, Reed has explained, was associated with transgression of sexual as well as national and historical boundaries).56 The photographs of Woolf and the Sitwells at the head and foot of this ‘Hall of Fame’ resonate together on the page. Both Beck and Macgregor images are bordered and, in contrast to the row of smaller images in between, present their literary subjects with faces turned to the side, eschewing the camera’s gaze, like the T. S. Eliot portrait discussed in the opening of this chapter, in poses that convey detachment, solemnity, and foster their reputations as enigmatic highbrow writers. Yet, the differences between the two images are also striking: Woolf’s dated costume and hair style contrast with Edith Sitwell’s contemporary dress and modern bob; her downcast eyes suggest introspection while the Sitwells stare straight ahead as if boldly anticipating the next advance. Woolf is portrayed as strangely out of time in this first appearance in Vogue. The caption identifies her as a successful publisher and leading writer of the post-war generation, but her image presents a model of diffident Victorian femininity in the dress of the 1890s, an act of performance that is encoded with Bloomsbury queerness and which locates Woolf and her writing beyond the whims of fashion as if with an aesthetic integrity that is immune to changing tastes. Woolf’s reputation in Vogue was mediated through the magazine’s wider construction of Bloomsbury, which located her at the centre of an avant-garde that epitomized modernity and nonconformity. In November 1924, in the issue preceding that in which Woolf’s first Vogue essay appeared, the magazine printed a three-page illustrated article on ‘Modern English Decoration’ by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant headed by a half-page photograph of wall panels in the sitting room of ‘the Tavistock Square house of Virginia Woolf, the brilliant author of Jacob’s Room and The Voyage Out’.57 This description echoes Woolf’s ‘Hall of Fame’ nomination as ‘the most brilliant novelist of the younger generation’ in May 1924 and establishes a refrain that would be repeated in later issues. When Leonard Woolf was nominated to Vogue’s ‘Hall of Fame’ in Late January 1925 among his many laudable attributes was his marriage

154  Modernist Reputations ‘to the brilliant novelist, Virginia Woolf’.58 In May 1925, inset within a review of Woolf’s The Common Reader (1925), an image of Woolf in contemporary dress from her second sitting for Beck and Macgregor appeared above a caption declaring her ‘one of the most brilliant of our younger novelists’ and ‘announcing an article by Mrs. Woolf in the next issue of Vogue’.59 In May 1926, the first Beck and Macgregor photograph of Woolf in her mother’s dress was reprinted as a full-page portrait alongside her last essay for Vogue accompanied by a caption once more asserting she is ‘the most brilliant and enterprising of the writers of the younger generation’.60 Garrity has observed ‘Vogue’s textual construction of [Woolf] as a writer of unparalleled brilliance, influence, and ascendancy’.61 These repeated allusions to Woolf’s perceived brilliance – a synonym for cleverness as well as excellence – feed into the magazine’s cultivation of her celebrity image as a leading modernist highbrow, a profile that is typified by Raymond Mortimer’s review of Mrs Dalloway in Vogue in Early June 1925. In the same issue in which Woolf writes on the contemporary novelist George Moore, Mortimer names Woolf ‘the chief agent of [the novel’s] disintegration’ in England and compares her writing to the work ‘of a modern painter, such as Matisse’ in ‘its capricious arabesques, its omissions, and the demands her imagination makes upon yours’.62 He refers to her imagination three times in the review – at one moment it is ‘on fire’, then it is ‘off like a runaway horse’ – suggesting both the interiority of her fiction and her reputed intellect, which is mentioned explicitly in the summation that ‘Mrs. Woolf is in love with life: that is her genius’.63 The perception of her ethereal detachment from everyday life and her upper-class status are conveyed by his assertions that ‘Mrs. Woolf writes more beautiful English, I consider, than anyone alive’ and rarely ‘trouble[s] herself with actual things’.64 As Garrity notes, ‘Vogue’s portrayal of Woolf as a signifier for high culture was ultimately dependent upon a discourse of modernism that shunned a mass audience, even though the magazine itself was a product of marketdriven mass culture’.65 Nevertheless, for a time Todd’s Vogue was deeply invested in marketing Woolf and Bloomsbury modernism, selling art as a commodity for the magazine’s fashion-conscious readers and playing an important role in shaping Woolf’s public profile as a leading light of the literary elite as she had hoped. Woolf’s treatment in Eve in the late 1920s, following the publication of her fifth novel To the Lighthouse (1927), winner of the prestigious Femina Prix Femina vie Heureuse Anglais in 1928, demonstrates the consolidation of her celebrity status. A caricature of Woolf by the artist Paul Bloomfield appeared in the centre of Eve’s book column on 4 April 1928, accompanied by a caption identifying ‘Virginia Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse”’ as ‘one of the three books by women writers selected for the final award of the French Femina prize’.66 The line-drawn cartoon depicts Woolf in profile with an elongated neck, enlarged nose,

Modernist Reputations  155 oversized hooded eye, thin pursed lips, and hair drawn tightly back to expose an abnormally high brow. The image presents a discerning, awkward face that mimics photographs of Woolf in circulation in the press while exaggerating her features to suggest intellectualism and her uppermiddle-class status: the large eye, the high-arched brow, the lofty head balanced precariously on a comically extended neck. It was one of a number of caricatures of writers by Bloomfield published in Eve during 1927–28. Catherine Clay documents a series of ‘Lampoons of Literary Celebrities’ appearing in Time and Tide in the same period with cartoons by Bloomfield and text by Sylvia Townsend Warner, including another Bloomfield image of Woolf, in which ‘the supposed inaccessibility of her works’ is ‘accentuated by the awkwardness of her pose’.67 Such caricatures reflect and fuelled Woolf’s reputation as a significant but difficult modern writer associated with intellectual culture. An earlier review of To the Lighthouse in Eve similarly emphasized the difficulty of Woolf’s writing and its deviation from conventional fictional forms. The novel was selected as ‘The Book of the Week’ by Richard King (Richard King Huskinson) on 1 June 1927 in a mixed review that asserts it has ‘no story at all’ and yet is ‘interesting from beginning to end’.68 ‘Scarcely any plot—and yet most thrilling’, King writes: ‘It takes the characters more than ten years to get to the Lighthouse however, although they plan to go there on the morrow in the first chapter!’69 King’s review evokes the terminology of psychoanalysis as he praises the novel as a ‘story of mental workings’ and declares ‘Mrs. Woolf has an uncanny genius for creating mental “atmosphere,” so that ideas, emotions, “dreams,” possess as much “drama” as when even murder is afoot’.70 The emphasis on her fiction’s interiority situates her within the literary avant-garde – though not specifically within the Bloomsbury set, who did not attract particular attention in Eve – and the reference to her ‘genius’ conveys her perceived intelligence and significance. In another issue, including a profile of Leonard Woolf, she is introduced as ‘Sir Leslie Stephen’s daughter’ and the ‘distinguished wife’ of ‘[a]n intellectual and a man of taste’.71 Woolf’s reception in Eve shows her establishment as a high cultural icon, by virtue of her literary achievements and her class, a process in which the magazine participates through its textual and visual representation of her image and her work. While Eve positioned Woolf firmly in the upper stratum of its literary and cultural elite, the essay she submitted to the magazine in this period conspicuously provides a counterpoint to the magazine’s usual deference to such class and cultural hierarchies. In a letter of 6 March 1928, Woolf recorded that she had ‘refused to write for the Evening Standard on the 9th year of marriage’, but, ‘on the other hand, I think I shall write a little article on Queen Elizabeth’s nose for Eve’.72 Her essay, ‘The Waxworks at the Abbey’, was printed in Eve on 23 May 1928. It was also published in the New Republic on 11 April 1928, reflecting her regular

156  Modernist Reputations practice of publishing essays in more than one venue to maximise their financial return, but had evidently been composed with Eve in mind. ‘The Waxworks at the Abbey’ describes the experience of visiting two London tourist attractions: the Royal United Services Museum, founded by the Duke of Wellington in 1831, and the waxwork funeral effigies of English monarchs and nobility held in a small chapel at Westminster Abbey.73 Through touring these buildings and their exhibits Woolf’s essay offers a satirical view of authority, curation, and the idolization of English royalty and aristocracy. She scrutinizes and gently pokes fun at the historical figures she describes and by imagining details about their lives and characters cuts them down to size to consider them as people rather than public figures elevated by position. Thus, Elizabeth I is ‘intellectual, suffering, tyrannical’, a ‘drawn, anguished figure’ with ‘wide and vigilant’ eyes and a nose as ‘thin as the beak of a hawk’, William III is ‘a little short in the legs’, and Queen Anne looks as if it ‘is only by accident that they have clapped a great crown on her hair and told her to rule a kingdom when she would so much rather have flirted discreetly […] or run to greet her husband smiling’.74 Woolf’s article resonates with and undercuts the hero-worship evident in Eve’s many high society and celebrity pages, such as the photo-feature ‘In Focus’ on the facing page admiring the upper classes posed at ‘the Kempton meeting and other happenings’, and ‘In Society’, a weekly gossip column flatteringly detailing the exploits of the rich and famous including ‘Stars of this year’s Covent Garden season photographed outside their hotel’.75 The editor’s billing of Woolf’s essay as a ‘pen picture of the Past—inspired by the effigies of the Lordly Ones—shifting from the sublime to the ridiculous’ acknowledges her satire, while Woolf herself is celebrated in the magazine as ‘Winner of the much-coveted “Femina” Prize’ and author of the ‘brilliant novel’ To the Lighthouse.76 The notion of brilliance continued to be associated with Woolf and her writing in the 1930s in Good Housekeeping, to which she contributed six essays in 1931. In October 1931, an editorial notice in the magazine described Woolf as ‘one of the finest writers of English prose now living’ and announced ‘we feel it a great honour that in the December number we shall begin the publication of a series of studies of London scenes from her brilliant pen’.77 In November 1931, the magazine printed her photograph alongside images of nine other famous contributors to the forthcoming Christmas issue, describing her as the ‘most brilliant of contemporary women writers’.78 Her first Good Housekeeping essay, ‘The Docks of London’ (December 1931), was billed as the ‘first in a gallery of scenes made vividly alive by the brilliant pen of VIRGINIA WOOLF’.79 ‘Oxford Street Tide’, the second essay in the series, was a ‘brilliant word picture’ that ‘in the beautiful precision of its language and thought […] reveals the name of its distinguished author—VIRGINIA WOOLF’.80 This flattering promotional copy was balanced, however,

Modernist Reputations  157 by more critical engagement with Woolf and Bloomsbury modernism within the magazine in 1932. In the context of the Great Depression, increasing political instability, and the highest levels of unemployment of the interwar period, the tide of popular opinion was turning determinedly against the intellectual liberalism of moneyed Bloomsbury and cosmopolitan modernism by the early 1930s. In ‘A Study in Black’, an article printed in Good Housekeeping in March 1932, Beverley Nichols portrays ‘Bloomsbury and Moscow and Greenwich Village’ as the home of wealthy, sheltered ‘idealists’, who, after a glass of gin or its equivalent, will sketch for you a charming picture of the future state of the world. As far as I can gather, we shall spend most of our time reclining in public parks in the shade of immense but very hygienic factories, talking with brilliant intelligence to ladies who wear smocks but no corsets.81 Notably, here the word ‘brilliant’ is employed in a satirical manner to deride the intellectualism of Bloomsbury and the radical avant-garde, whose ‘intelligence’ is perceived as ineffectual naval-gazing untroubled by social and economic realities. The progressive gender politics associated with Bloomsbury – evoked with the derogatory reference to ‘ladies who wear smocks but no corsets’ – are also ridiculed and dismissed by Nichols. Ironically, Woolf’s essay ‘Great Men’s Houses’ appeared in the same issue, presenting a slyly feminist critique of the standards by which a man is deemed ‘Great’ and of the Victorian patriarchal home through its bleak reimagining of the domestic life of Thomas Carlyle.82 In April 1932, Woolf appeared as a subject of Mary Craik’s ‘Ladies of Letters’ series in Good Housekeeping. Reviewing Woolf’s career to date, Craik praises Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out and her literary criticism in The Common Reader, but displays discomfort with her experimental writing. Her expressed preference for Woolf’s essays and dislike of her modernist fiction reflects the largely conservative literary tastes of the magazine’s readership as well as the movement against modernism among critics at this time.83 Propagating the perception of modernist literature as hostile to the reader, Craik declares Jacob’s Room ‘intangible and elusive’ and ‘really difficult to read’.84 She ‘do[es] not pretend to understand’ To the Lighthouse ‘except in flashes here and there’ and describes Mrs Dalloway as ‘another of those books, which, like Virginia Woolf herself, is difficult to classify’.85 The Waves, Woolf’s latest and most radically modernist text, is pronounced ‘a strange and interesting experiment’, which, Craik hopes, Woolf will not be tempted to repeat.86 She complains of ‘boredom’ reading the novel, which contains ‘beauty’ and ‘imagination’, but ‘rouse[s] no interest in the subjective meanderings’ of its characters ‘in spite of the precocious beauty of the English

158  Modernist Reputations in which they phrase their thoughts’.87 Such criticisms of Woolf’s modernism were widespread among reviewers in the early 1930s, and Craik broadcasts Woolf’s reputation in the decade as a gifted but out-of-touch celebrity writer. She suggests the inaccessibility of Woolf’s visionary novels is an unavoidable consequence of her aloof intellectualism: ‘One of her chief occupations in the country is keeping off callers’, we are told, ‘for she is by nature a recluse’.88 Woolf’s reputation as an aloof upper-class aesthete was also conveyed by paratextual elements surrounding her short story ‘In the Looking Glass’ in Harper’s Bazaar in January 1930. Analysed in Chapter 3, this story depicts a rich spinster, Isabella Tyson, who is revealed at the story’s close to be ‘perfectly empty’ with ‘no thoughts’ and ‘no friends’.89 In Harper’s Bazaar, it was headed by an editorial caption – ‘Am I dreaming thoughts or thinking dreams?’ – that alludes to the lyrical prose and modernist prioritization of psychology over plot that Woolf was well known for at this stage of her career.90 The story was also accompanied by a large half-page illustration by Cecil Beaton portraying its protagonist standing before the hallway mirror ‘in her thin summer dress, carrying a basket’, having ‘gone down the grass path […] to pick flowers’ (see Figure 4.3).91 The composition of Beaton’s image, framed by the gilt frame of the looking glass, draws directly on Woolf’s text with its description of ‘the hall table, the sunflowers, the garden path’ reflected in the glass, the ‘handful of casual letters’ strewn on the ‘marble-topped table’, and, at the story’s close, Isabella ‘stood by the table’ as ‘the letters and the table and the grass walk and the sunflowers which had been waiting in the looking glass separated and opened out so that she might be received among them’.92 To the image Beaton adds, however, a stack of books, a pair of reading glasses, and a small figurine of a female nude on the hall table. None of these objects are detailed in the story. Instead, these additions suggest the literary and artistic milieu of Woolf and Bloomsbury. Beaton’s illustration blurs the distinction between the author and her story’s wealthy female protagonist, dressing Woolf up as Isabella. Reading ‘In the Looking Glass’ in Harper’s Bazaar, supported by this image and editorial caption, conjures up and accentuates Woolf’s contemporary reputation in Britain as a glamorous but elusive upper-class aesthete, crowned ‘Queen of the High-brows’ by Arnold Bennett in the Evening Standard on 28 November 1929.93 Woolf’s literary success reached its peak in the late 1930s. Her novel The Years (1937) sold well in the UK and became a bestseller in America, where it went through twelve re-impressions in the first six months together totalling 37,900 copies.94 Off the back of this success, Woolf sold three more stories to Harper’s Bazaar – ‘The Shooting Party’ (March 1938), ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’ (April 1938), and ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ (April 1939) – and delighted in both the economic and

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Figure 4.3 Virginia Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, Harper’s Bazaar, January 1930.

160  Modernist Reputations emotional boost afforded her by this popularity. ‘Happily—if thats [sic.] the word’, she recorded in her diary on 17 August 1937, ‘I get these electric shocks—Cables asking me to write’.95 Woolf’s late 1930s Harper’s Bazaar contributions were all initially sought or accepted by editors of the New York edition before being published on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘It is undoubtedly a great freshener to have my story [‘Lappin and Lapinova’] taken by Harper’s’, she observed on 18 January 1939, ‘I heard this morning. A beautiful story, enchanted to have it. 600 dollars made then’.96 She records her pleasure first at the financial reward of this commission, but also ‘the encouragement’ of this reception.97 Woolf felt it is as ‘a warmer, a reviver’, to know that this audience was eager for her writing.98 Her popularity in this elite fashion magazine in the 1930s reflects the growing market for writing by modernist authors in the later interwar period as literary modernism’s central proponents became bestsellers while maintaining their association with high culture. When Harper’s Bazaar would not accept her story ‘The Legacy’ in January 1941, in contrast, Woolf was incredulous and outraged. ‘Three months ago you wrote to me saying that the American office had cabled to you “clamouring for” a story from me’, she wrote to the assistant editor on 23 January 1941, ‘I gather that you propose, without apology, to repudiate your agreement’.99 Her anger at this perceived broken contract was infused with feelings of ‘depression, rejection’ at the snub and its possible indication of waning popularity.100 More than a decade after delighting in the prospect of Vogue ‘tak[ing] up Mrs Woolf, to boom her’, Woolf was not above caring about her reception in a fashion magazine: ‘Mrs Lynd in Harper’s Bazaar sneers, says I preach sitting still on a sofa’, she wrote in her diary on 28 May 1938, evidently disgruntled by Lynd’s review of Three Guineas.101 Woolf was alert to and valued her reputation in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1920s and 1930s, and capitalized on the opportunity for publicity and financial reward that writing for these magazines and Eve and Good Housekeeping provided. Similarly, for a time at least, these women’s magazines valued Woolf’s contributions, and played their part in shaping her reputation and the reception of Bloomsbury modernism.

Gertrude Stein and the Parisian Scene in Harper’s Bazaar Paris in the 1920s has ‘largely come to epitomize a particular conception of High Modernism’, Alex Goody asserts in Modernist Articulations (2007), one that emphasizes ‘expatriate, urban experience’, the pursuit of ‘new and original culture’, and ‘a strong opposition to bourgeois culture and institutions’.102 Goody identifies this reputation as the product of contemporary and retrospective journalistic, autobiographical, and scholarly accounts, including Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which ‘reveal how Paris modernism is discursively constructed and marketed to and for an external audience’ and make

Modernist Reputations  161 it ‘difficult to maintain the separation between modernism and commercialism that seems to characterise Paris of the 1920s’.103 As a further example, Goody cites Janet Flanner’s fortnightly ‘Paris Letter’ for the New Yorker as ‘an obvious vehicle for the presentation of a version of cosmopolitan Paris to an international audience’.104 ‘Writing about gossip and celebrity, commercial enterprises and the avant-garde in a single letter’, Goody observes, ‘Flanner’s journalism offers a spectacular Paris “from the eye of the dallying, cosmopolitan flâneur”, a world where modernist literature and art co-exist with fashion, society events and mass-cultural forms’.105 British Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar likewise participated in the marketing of Paris as a centre of both high culture and haute couture. In the 1920s, Vogue presented illustrations of Paris fashions alongside reviews of Paris art exhibitions, while Eve’s regular column ‘Eve in PARadISe’, like Flanner’s ‘Paris Letter’ in the New Yorker, combined reports of Parisian style, restaurants, theatre, and the activities of socialites and artists in a gossipy narrative. The following discussion explores how British Harper’s Bazaar participated in the discursive construction of Paris as a productive space for high art and elite culture with particular attention to the magazine’s reception of Gertrude Stein. Between 1931 and 1937, Stein’s writing was printed in six issues of Harper’s Bazaar, including the publication of three excerpts from her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933. My analysis seeks to contextualize the largely overlooked appearance of this canonical text in the magazine and uncovers Stein’s reputation here in the early 1930s. It traces interactions between her writing and the magazine’s surrounding editorial and advertising content to show how Stein’s Autobiography fed into Harper’s Bazaar’s presentation of Paris as the origin of both sartorial fashion and modern trends in art, and the magazine’s wider blending of modernism and women’s culture. In September 1931, Harper’s Bazaar published D. B. Wyndham Lewis’s ‘From a Paris Note Book’, a pseudo travel journal accompanied by comic cartoons by Aubrey Hammond. Lewis was a renowned wit and satirical columnist who ‘suffered with good humour the misfortune of sharing his name with Percy Wyndham Lewis’ and wrote successful columns for mass-market newspapers the Daily Express and Daily Mail as well as contributing to a broad range of periodicals, including society magazine The Tatler from 1933.106 In the 1930s, he contributed a number of humorous sketches and articles to Harper’s Bazaar. ‘From a Paris Note Book’ is framed by Lewis as extracts from ‘one or two notebooks I kept when I lived in Paris’, which he imagines might produce ‘a badlyneeded book’ on the French capital that will be: not an ordinary guide, nor one of those intimate charming books on restaurants and theatres and Lalique glass and James Joyce and the Salon des Indépendants and Chanel and Marie Laurencin and bookstalls and Gallo-Roman remains and Gertrude Stein and Cocteau

162  Modernist Reputations and so forth, but just a book on Paris, with the provisional title: ‘So You’re Going To Paris! Well, Don’t Call On Me’.107 The article parodies the nostalgic narratives of modernism’s origins growing in popularity at this time, while simultaneously cultivating the celebrity of the modernist figures it satirizes, including Stein. It is presented as an antidote to travel books and early memoirs depicting Paris as a bustling hub of cosmopolitanism, haute couture, high culture, and modernism, though in fact its satirical anecdotes repeatedly reinforce this reputation. Lewis pokes fun at modernism’s aesthetic strategies and elitist publishing practices with reference to a spoof text purportedly by ‘Miss Gertrude Stein’ and ‘printed on handmade papier du Japon, in a limited edition, one volume, 20 by 26 hors commerce, each copy numbered and signed, and issued to subscribers only’.108 His parody evokes the concision, repetition, and mischievous wordplay of Stein’s infamously difficult modernist writing: As to places. Places as to. Clocks and lilac and Camembert and El Greco and old striped trousers. Next. How next. Next as to. As seen a scene. So seen, seen so much as. Right. Left right left right left. No decision. For instance. And Picasso had the. Had the. If. Thank you very much thank you very.109 The nonsensical content of these lines, ‘issued [as] an important message’, undermines the value allegedly ascribed to them by Stein and generated through the production of limited-edition volumes.110 At the same time, however, Lewis confirms Stein’s highbrow status by reinforcing her reputation as a central figure of the Parisian avant-garde and leading experimental writer. Leick has traced the role played by such parodies in generating Stein’s celebrity in the mainstream American press of the 1910s and 1920s.111 ‘So omnipresent and captivating were these kinds of parodic interpretations that modernism became inextricably understood

Modernist Reputations  163 through them’, Leonard Diepeveen notes in his anthology of Mock Modernism.112 As Hammill observes of Vanity Fair, parodies of modernist writers ‘interpellate an audience already familiar with avant-garde texts, flattering readers by implying that they are too sophisticated to be intimidated by experimental writing, but that they can also recognize the over-sophistication (speciousness, obscurity) of certain highbrow postures’.113 Readers of ‘From a Paris Note Book’ in Harper’s Bazaar are similarly invited to demonstrate their sophisticated stance on modernist culture by regarding Stein with an ironic, critical eye. While Lewis’s article highlights the difficulty, obscurity, and potential over-sophistication of Stein’s experimentalism, however, the same Harper’s Bazaar issue conversely endorses Stein’s writing and makes it available to readers by publishing her short story ‘Left to Right’. This text was Stein’s first contribution to British Harper’s Bazaar, and it appeared ten pages away from Lewis’s ‘From a Paris Note Book’. As she would later recall in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘Left to Right’ fictionalizes Stein’s break with the French surrealist Georges Hugnet and his circle after she ‘offered to translate’ his poem Enfances ‘but instead […] wrote a poem about it’, which ‘at first pleased Georges Hugnet too much and then did not please him at all’.114 Stein’s poem became Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded (1931), and, as the Autobiography recounts, after ‘[e]verybody mixed themselves up in all this’, she ‘consoled herself by telling all about it in a delightful short story […] which was printed in the London Harper’s Bazaar’.115 The details of these events and their players are buried in Stein’s story, which plainly depicts a quarrel over a book but does not indicate its content. It repeatedly refers to ‘everybody talking’ about ‘everything’ without precisely identifying what ‘everything’ signifies.116 As Ulla Dydo notes, the text is ‘made up of main clauses whose subjects, “I,” “he,” “they,” “one,” “everyone,” are all totally depersonalized’.117 Hugnet appears as ‘Arthur William’ and the composer Virgil Thomson as ‘Generale Erving’, who is introduced as ‘a writer, that is to say he had written not writing but something’.118 Yet, the elusiveness of Stein’s fast-paced prose paradoxically creates an illusion of accessibility by mimicking the intimate, informal tone of one confiding in a friend and assuming the details of the matter are already known between them. ‘Generale Erving told me over the telephone that he wanted to fix up everything’, the narrator reports at breakneck speed: ‘It was alright but it would be alright and Arthur was not at all there but he Generale Erving would see him was I willing’.119 Harper’s Bazaar encourages the reception of ‘Left to Right’ as a modernist experiment in gossip by heading the text with the two-line caption ‘Everybody/Knows all about this Thing …’, though the exact meaning of ‘this Thing’ – and the subject of the story – remains unclear.120 To further emphasize Stein’s association with new movements in the art and the story’s experimentalism, it was illustrated with a fullpage image by Claude Flight on the facing page showing an arrangement

164  Modernist Reputations of geometric shapes representing, at their centre, an indistinct figure with an open book.121 Within one issue, then, Harper’s Bazaar fosters contradictory yet complementary perspectives on Stein and modernism. Lewis’s sketch satirizes her writing’s difficulty and inaccessibility, but frames the reader as sophisticated enough to regard with wry, knowing amusement rather than awe modernism’s experimental aesthetic practices and exclusive publishing methods. The publication of ‘Left to Right’ simultaneously promotes and commodifies Stein’s writing, making it available to the magazine’s readers and enhancing their cultural sophistication through direct contact with a high modernist author. Lewis’s ‘From a Paris Note Book’ looks back on modernism’s origins to consolidate Stein’s significance to the Parisian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, while the billing of ‘Left to Right’ as ‘A Study in the New Manner by Gertrude Stein’ confirms her relevance to the present.122 Meanwhile, multiple fashion features in this issue evoke Paris as a hub of modernity and elite culture such as ‘Hats of the Moment in Paris’, ‘Last-Minute Sketches from Paris’, and Marjorie’s Howard’s ‘Paris Telegrams’, which sends news from the Autumn openings in the brisk condensed style of the telegram to report, for example, ‘Frocks still show softness with flounces tiers or little frills quite popular’.123 The use of simple language and the removal of internal punctuation in Howard’s article suggest directness and immediacy while concurrently generating ambiguity: ‘Dark reds fewer dark but bright blues and note of purple in almost all houses’.124 The effect is notably similar to Stein’s sparsely-punctuated prose in ‘Left to Right’, allying radical modernist literature with innovative high fashion, and such playful experiment with fashion copy was not unique to this issue or to Harper’s Bazaar (there are other examples of fashion reports framed as telegrams, letters, or telephone conversations in 1930s Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue). Reading across these different items of Paris-focused content in this September 1931 number, Harper’s Bazaar’s participation in the discursive construction of Paris as the nucleus of avant-garde art and fashion is especially evident. Set against the magazine’s wider portrayal of Paris as the productive home of high culture, Lewis’s ‘From a Paris Note Book’ and Stein’s ‘Left to Right’ work in tandem, despite apparent tensions between them, to bolster Stein’s reputation as an important if perplexing highbrow modern writer. When viewed in this context, and with knowledge of the magazine’s broader attention to modernism in the early 1930s (as detailed in Chapter 2), the publication of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in Harper’s Bazaar no longer appears a serendipitous anomaly as it has presumably appeared to Stein scholars who have left this publication venue unexplored. Instead, Harper’s Bazaar’s publication of the Autobiography accords with the magazine’s long-standing attempts to exploit modernism’s cultural capital and the exclusivity associated with Stein

Modernist Reputations  165 and the Parisian avant-garde. Crucially, however, the three instalments of the Autobiography printed in Harper’s Bazaar from June to August 1933 appeared without attribution to Stein. In the contents lists for these issues and above each instalment, the text was billed simply as ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’. In The Atlantic Monthly, in contrast, where the Autobiography was serialized in four issues from May to August 1933, Stein was identified as its author from the outset. The cover page of the May 1933 issue of Atlantic Monthly listed ‘Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I: Discovering Picasso and Matisse’ at the top of its table of contents with Gertrude Stein’s name printed alongside.125 Yet, Stein had desired, as Natalia Cecire has traced in correspondence between her agent William Bradley and the Atlantic’s editor Ellery Sedgwick, ‘to publish excerpts of the Autobiography in The Atlantic Monthly unsigned, as if by Alice’.126 Cecire documents that ‘Sedgwick firmly denied the request on the grounds that it would render the material “unintelligible to our readers. Imperative that we use name”’.127 Sedgwick’s insistence is understandable in light of Leick’s account of Stein’s fame across the American press before 1933, which, she contends, was so well established that ‘it was because Stein was a household name that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a bestseller’.128 P. Joyce Reynolds, editor of British Harper’s Bazaar, evidently did not enforce similar restrictions on the text’s publication or believe that the Autobiography would be unintelligible or uninteresting to her magazine’s readers without revealing Stein’s authorship – although, having published ‘Left to Right’ in 1931, she was also not unaware of the value of Stein’s name and her writing. If there was any debate between Reynolds and Bradley (who presumably arranged the text’s publication) about whether the Autobiography would be signed or unsigned in Harper’s Bazaar, it has yet to be documented.129 Perhaps Reynolds was assured that her readers’ interest in high art and high culture was sufficient to make publication of this memoir attractive even without it bearing either Stein’s distinctive style – her imprimatur – or her signature. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas locates Stein at the centre of a network of high cultural celebrities that had already been subject to scrutiny, both celebratory and satirical, within the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. The first instalment in June 1933 was given a double-page spread with a list of subheadings highlighting the text’s discussion of high modernist artists and cultural spaces likely to attract the reader’s interest: ‘Arrival in Paris— / Meeting with Gertrude Stein— / Saturday Evenings in the rue de Fleurus— / Picasso—Matisse— / Braque— / and the Vernissage of the Independent’ (see Figure 4.4).130 The text was accompanied by three images further emphasizing its focus on modernist celebrities and Paris: the Man Ray photograph of Stein and Toklas in their Paris home chosen as frontispiece for the first book edition of the Autobiography; an image of Picasso’s painting Homage à Gertrude; and a cropped snapshot

166  Modernist Reputations of Picasso and Fernande Olivier out with their dogs in Paris (Picasso clutches a dog under his left arm). The informal pose of the third photograph parallels images of notable people at leisure in Harper’s Bazaar’s society photo-spreads, though the caption – ‘Pablo and Fernande in Montmartre’ – is much more familiar than those given to the magazine’s society snapshots, which routinely detail the full name and title of individuals pictured.131 This caption suggests close acquaintance with the subjects, implying both Toklas’s (or rather Stein’s) intimacy with Picasso and the reader’s familiarity with him as a public personality. The first photograph, in contrast, showcases the vast proportions of Stein’s atelier with its startling use of light and shadow and broad frame, and, in the context of Harper’s Bazaar, parallels the attractive images of domestic spaces prevalent in the magazine’s features on interior design and celebrity homes. Within the photograph, Stein sits writing at her desk while Toklas emerges in silhouette against the illuminated doorway. Leigh Gilmore has shown how this Man Ray image ‘replaces the title page’ in the first book edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein’s authorship was concealed until the text’s mischievous closing assertion that ‘About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. […] I am going to write it for you. […] And she has and this is it’.132 In Harper’s Bazaar, where this closing revelation was omitted, Man Ray’s photograph continues to supply a coded representation of Stein’s authorship and endorsement of her status as a professional writer alongside offering the reader a privileged glimpse into her private, domestic space. ‘Domestication […] emerges as a key concept in The Autobiography’, Goldman argues, ‘which can be read as a domestic novel of sorts, drawing on a nineteenth-century tradition of chronicling indoor, private doings, filtered through the consciousness of the character who is cast in the role of “wife”’.133 The voicing of Stein’s memoir through Toklas, who recalls her experiences of Stein’s Paris salon as a guest and subsequently as hostess and the ‘wife of a genius’ (alongside other ‘wives of geniuses’ she claims to have entertained), leads to the inclusion of numerous observations on subjects typically deemed of women’s, and particularly, wifely interest, such as domestic arrangements, fashion, and gossip.134 These aspects of the Autobiography are amplified by editorial and commercial content in Harper’s Bazaar. The second instalment, printed in July 1933, sat opposite a full-page fashion photograph of the glamorous Comtesse Henri de Castellane wearing a hat by Jean Patou, for example, while the third, printed in August 1933, appeared alongside a series of furnishing photographs showing ‘modern styles’ in ‘a Berkeley Square apartment’ and ‘a Chelsea drawing-room’.135 Towards the close of the final instalment, which describes the ‘endless variety’ of Saturday evenings at Stein and Toklas’s home, an advertisement beside it for ‘“Black & White” Scotch Whisky’ bears the slogan ‘For all occasions…’.136 The advertisement depicts an intimate dinner party with five glamorous men

Figure 4.4 G er trude Stein, ‘T he Autobiography of A lice B . Toklas’, Har pe r’s Baz a ar, June 1933.

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168  Modernist Reputations and women in evening dress sat in conversation at a table laid with white tablecloth and candles. The ‘occasion’ is quite different to the informality of Stein’s atelier as described here, to which ‘everybody came’, both ‘friends’ and ‘endless strangers’, and ‘Gertrude Stein sat peacefully in a chair’ while ‘those who could did the same, and the rest stood’.137 However, the advertisement’s framing of ‘brilliance and zest’ as signs of ‘the success of any social gathering’, qualities it suggests Black & White whisky will promote, resonates with Toklas’s recollections of lively gatherings of ‘delightful people’ at the rue de Fleurus, including gossipy descriptions of memorable visitors such as Roger Fry, who ‘was always charming’, ‘Epstein the sculptor’ with his ‘english wife who had a very remarkable pair of brown eyes’, ‘Lady Otoline Morril [sic.] looking like a marvellous feminine version of Disraeli’, and ‘a dutch near-royalty who was left by her escort who had to go and find a cab’.138 Harper’s Bazaar’s fashion content also interacts productively with the Autobiography. When Stein, speaking as Toklas, first sketches the character of Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier in the text’s first instalment, she recalls that Fernande ‘was not the least amusing’ and ‘had two subjects, hats and perfumes’ – ‘This first day we talked hats’.139 ‘She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat’, the narrator explains, ‘if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man in the street the hat was not a success’.140 An anecdote follows describing how ‘once in Montmartre she and I were walking together’, Fernande in ‘a large yellow hat’ and Toklas in ‘a much smaller blue one’, when ‘a workman stopped and called out, there go the sun and the moon shining together’, to which Fernande said ‘with a radiant smile, you see our hats are a success’.141 These observations demonstrate what Chad Bennett calls the ‘bad manners’ of gossip, which draws ‘its authority […] in speaking of as much as to others’ and yet, he contends, ‘also strangely animates its objects’ agency’ through its ‘objectifying talk’.142 Gossip’s potential to animate is demonstrated too by this caricature of Fernande, which begins somewhat maliciously by identifying her limited fields of interest to ridicule them, but then wryly celebrates her ‘true french feeling’ for hats. The paragraph closes with Fernande’s radiant declaration of sartorial success, a triumphant retort to her objectification by both Stein’s narrative and the man in the street. Printed in the latter portion of the first instalment of the Autobiography, this sketch of Fernande appears next to advertisements for various products, including biscuits, nail polish, permanent hair waving, ‘Condor Hats for Ascot’, and ‘Liberty Hats’ that ‘are so becoming and easy to wear’.143 Elsewhere in the issue, a three-page photospread showcases the latest millinery styles from Paris.144 Read within Harper’s Bazaar, for which, of course, hats are a legitimate concern, this episode resonates with surrounding commercial and editorial matter to excuse Fernande’s fashion consciousness, though without forgiving her unsophistication. Goldman has observed that ‘Stein echoes the discourses of celebrity that are part of this period’s zeitgeist’ in the Autobiography by ‘“teas[ing]

Modernist Reputations  169 the fault line between the public and private lives of the stars” […] in its treatment of public figures as ordinary characters’.145 The text’s photographs and conversational tone accord with systems of celebrity already at work in Harper’s Bazaar, exemplified by such features as Lady Sibell Lygon’s ‘Vanity Fair’, the monthly society gossip column appearing in all issues of the magazine containing instalments of Stein’s text. The Autobiography’s subversive merging of high culture with women’s culture, evoked through its narrator’s attention to hostessing, the domestic sphere, fashion, and gossip also fits comfortably within the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar for which these fields were complementary. The magazine, in common with other upmarket fashion magazines of the period, constructs Paris as a site of both cosmopolitan high culture and elite women’s culture through its status as the continental capital of haute couture and avant-garde aesthetics. Stein’s reputation in Harper’s Bazaar, both as it is presented in her Autobiography and elsewhere, is filtered through this popular image of Paris as well as wider discourses of women’s culture in circulation in this commercial periodical. In the September 1934 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Reynolds printed ‘And Now’, Stein’s essay-length sequel to the Autobiography, simultaneously with its publication in Vanity Fair in America. ‘Written between late November 1933 and early spring of 1934, “And Now” is a strange, unfinished piece’, Dydo describes, that was the outcome of Stein’s ‘aborted’ attempt to write another commercial success in the form of ‘a second autobiographical volume in the voice of the Autobiography’.146 To produce this book proved ‘completely impossible’ for Stein despite her agreement with Bradley to do so; ‘she could not regain the Toklas voice […] to repeat the successful impersonation’ and the article eventually published, after the American edition of Harper’s Bazaar first rejected it, was ‘a text cut from the heavily revised piece she had written’.147 Within British Harper’s Bazaar, however, this short aborted text has commercial value and tops the list of ‘Fiction and Special Features’ in this ‘Advance Paris Fashions’ number. Stein’s writing carries the editorial billing ‘By the author of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”’ reflecting the extent to which this bestselling book had acquired its own celebrity, which the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar had helped to generate and now exploits.148 As this upmarket fashion magazine capitalized on the symbolic capital associated with Stein and the Parisian avant-garde in the early 1930s, it cultivated Stein’s reputation as a significant and challenging modernist writer, and, by printing her work, extended her writing to new British readers and facilitated her entry to the mainstream.

Conclusions ‘[B]ecause of the rise of celebrity culture’, Leick observes, ‘modernist writers and texts were better known and, indeed, more popular than has been acknowledged’.149 This chapter has shown how high modernist writers found fame and moved from notoriety to popularity in the

170  Modernist Reputations pages of British women’s magazines. Whether celebrated or satirized, modernist writers and artists were subject to enquiry and promotion in Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar. These magazines exploited the cultural cachet associated with modernist celebrities and their works, and concurrently shaped their reputations. Seeking to emphasize the modernists’ prestige, women’s magazines frequently highlighted their seriousness, brilliance, or genius, and the difficulty, challenge, and minority audiences of their writing and art. At the same time, and conversely, these magazines also cultivated familiarity with modernist writers and artists and their experimental aesthetic strategies. Vogue in the mid-1920s encouraged the reception of Virginia Woolf as a formidable intellectual force and leading highbrow novelist and, filtered through the magazine’s wider portrayal of the Bloomsbury set, aligned her with modernity and nonconformity. Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar in the late 1920s and 1930s reflected and supported the consolidation of Woolf’s public profile as an aloof intellectual aesthete and demonstrate the fluctuating reputations of Woolf and Bloomsbury in the later interwar period. Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1930s fostered Gertrude Stein’s reputation as an iconic experimental highbrow at the heart of the Parisian avant-garde through parodying and printing her works. The magazine packaged and sold signed and unsigned contributions by Stein to readers aspiring to cultural sophistication as an exclusive slice of high modernist culture. Both Woolf and Stein benefited from the opportunity to extend their readerships through publication in British women’s magazines. They and other modernists, including those like T. S. Eliot whose works did not appear directly in these magazines, also benefited from promotion through the wider systems of celebrity operating in women’s periodicals. Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar marketed and moulded modernist personalities while positioning them within a highly commercialized women’s culture.

Notes 1 Editorial caption below Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor, ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’, Vogue, Early April 1925, p. 70. 2 Ibid. 3 There are two further examples during Todd’s four-year editorship, photographic portraits by Beck and Macgregor of Edith Sitwell (Early October 1925) and Virginia Woolf (Early May 1926). Both mirror the layout of the Eliot portrait and Vogue’s regular society profiles with a wide border framing the photograph and a caption below identifying and praising the subject. 4 ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’, Vogue, Late August 1924, p. 48. The photograph that appeared alongside Eliot’s nomination was taken by Emil Otto Hoppé. 5 In comparison, a second photograph from this sitting in which Eliot faces the camera was printed alongside Aldington’s ‘Modern Free Verse: Article II’, Vogue, Early December 1925, p. 95.

Modernist Reputations  171

172  Modernist Reputations

Modernist Reputations  173

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82

room and their reception in Vogue, see Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, pp. 223–5. ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’, Vogue, Late January 1924, p. 54. Editorial caption alongside Edwin Muir, ‘Three New Books’, Vogue, Late May 1925, p. 63. Editorial caption below Beck and Macgregor, ‘Virginia Woolf’, Vogue, Early May 1926, p. 68. Garrity, p. 207. Raymond Mortimer, ‘New Books for the Morning Room Table’, Vogue, Early June 1925, p. 60. Ibid. Ibid. Garrity, p. 213. Editorial caption alongside Paul Bloomfield, ‘Virginia Woolf’, inset within Richard King, ‘Talking about Books…’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 4 April 1928, p. 17. Catherine Clay, Time and Tide: The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 124. Clay records ‘Lampoons of Literary Celebrities’ appeared in Time and Tide from October 1927 to January 1928. Bloomfield’s Woolf cartoon ‘Mrs. Woolf is Visited by some Uncommon Readers’ appeared on 25 November 1927. Richard King, ‘Talking about Books…’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 1 June 1927, p. 505. Ibid. Ibid. Richard King, ‘Talking about Books…’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 19 October 1927, p. 154. Woolf, Letters, III, pp. 468–9. Leena Kore Schroder has explored Woolf’s fascination with the Westminster Abbey waxworks, which appear in her letters, essays, and fiction; see Leena Kore Schroder, ‘Waxing into Words: Virginia Woolf and the Westminster Abbey Funeral Effigies’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 85 (2014), 15–18. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Waxworks at the Abbey’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 23 May 1928, p. 429. ‘In Focus’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 23 May 1928, p. 428; ‘In Society’, Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 23 May 1928, p. 431. Editorial captions above Woolf, ‘Waxworks at the Abbey’, p. 429. Editorial notice, Good Housekeeping, October 1931, p. 192. Editorial notice, Good Housekeeping, November 1931, p. 2. In this blackand-white photograph, a small and rather poor-quality image, Woolf’s face is turned from the camera, her hair is cut with a fringe, and she appears to be wearing a white blouse. I have not identified the photographer or the date of this image. Editorial caption to Virginia Woolf, ‘The Docks of London’, Good Housekeeping, December 1931, p. 16. Editorial caption to Virginia Woolf, ‘Oxford Street Tide’, Good Housekeeping, January 1932, p. 18. Beverley Nichols, ‘A Study in Black’, Good Housekeeping, March 1932, p. 24. I expand this feminist reading of ‘Great Men’s Houses’ and Woolf’s Good Housekeeping essays as a whole in Alice Wood, ‘Made to Measure: Virginia Woolf in Good Housekeeping Magazine’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 32.1 (2010), 12–24. See also, in particular, Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel

174  Modernist Reputations

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Jeanette McVicker, ‘“Six Essays on London Life”: A History of Dispersal’, 2 Parts, Woolf Studies Annual, 9 (2003), 143–65; and Woolf Studies Annual, 10 (2004), 141–72. ‘The Result of Our Reading Questionnaire’ (March 1929) transcribed in the appendix suggests little appetite for modernist writing among the magazine’s readers. Mary Craik, ‘Virginia Woolf’, Good Housekeeping, April 1932, p. 106. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 106. Virginia Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, Harper’s Bazaar, January 1930, p. 98. Editorial caption above Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, p. 43. Woolf, ‘In the Looking Glass’, p. 98. Ibid., pp, 43, 98. Quoted in Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, ed., Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 258. B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 3nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 63. Woolf, Diary, V (1984), p. 107. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid. Ibid. Woolf, Letters, VI (1980), p. 463. Woolf, Diary, V, p. 354. Woolf, Diary: II, p. 319; V, p. 145. Alex Goody, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 118–19. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid. Ibid.; internal quotation from Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 153. Godfrey Smith, ‘Lewis, (Dominic) Bevan Wyndham (1891–1969)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, rev. edn (Oxford University Press, 2004) . D. B. Wyndham Lewis, ‘From a Paris Note Book’, Harper’s Bazaar, September 1931, p. 30 (emphasis in original). Ibid., p. 31 (emphasis in original). Ibid. Ibid. See Leick, Making of an American Celebrity. Leonard Diepeveen, Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910–1935 (Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 4. Faye Hammill, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), pp. 159–60. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: The Modern Library, 1980), p. 231. Ibid. Gertrude Stein, ‘Left to Right’, Harper’s Bazaar, September 1931, p. 41. Ulla Dydo with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), p. 321.

Modernist Reputations  175



























































Coda

‘For modernist writers’, Laura Frost contends, ‘pleasure was a problem’ and ‘a force that seemed to have run amok in contemporary culture: in the cinema, in popular literature, and in the public’s enthusiasm for fun’.1 ‘Women, who had long been cast as the ground of somatic, nonintellectual pleasure’, were aligned with the ‘easy, accessible pleasure (of the cinema, magazines, etc.)’ that many modernists and other early twentieth-century cultural critics and intellectuals feared ‘would threaten literature and deep thought’. 2 ‘The purchasing power of the female reader’ and her impact on the literary marketplace was a source of great anxiety for highbrow writers in the early twentieth century, as Paul Delany observes, and ‘a constant target for modernist misogyny’.3 This book has shown how four commercial British women’s magazines trespassed on the realm of modernism and high art and literature in the interwar period. In different ways, and to different degrees, Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar provided their predominantly middle-class female readers with access to avant-garde culture and the interpretative tools with which to respond to it. These magazines explored the difficult pleasures of modernism, or what Frost calls its ‘unpleasure’, within the same periodical spaces in which they relished the more immediate sensory and escapist pleasures of fashion, popular fiction, and other mass cultural forms.4 Subversively, they approached modernism through discourses of women’s culture, including fashion, celebrity, and gossip, and situated modernist art and literature in dialogue with modernity’s broader pleasures and challenges for women. ‘Modernism is only one aspect of the culture of women’s modernity’, as Rita Felski has asserted.5 British women’s magazines of the interwar era interrogated the nature of modernity in multiple ways and regarded women as modern through their activities in both the public and domestic spheres. The homemaker was cast as the modern housewife; the female shopper as the modern consumer. In common with the broader women’s periodical press in this period, the magazines surveyed in this study were alert to the new rights and opportunities opening up for women as workers and citizens in the wake of the First World War and also negotiated women’s roles as mothers, wives, and daughters in the context of

Coda  177 contemporary shifts in gender and sexual relations. Fashion-conscious Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar framed women as modern subjects with particular regard to their dress and their attention to new aesthetic and cultural trends. Good Housekeeping focused on and promoted the modernization of the home, while simultaneously addressing its readers as socially engaged, intelligent, outward-looking modern women attentive to current affairs as well as new literature and ideas. Chapter 1 of this book unpacked diverse reactions and contrary attitudes to modernity across these four selected women’s magazines in the interwar years. This analysis furthers our understanding of periodical texts that have been historically devalued, side-lined, and overlooked due to preconceptions about their content and long-held prejudices against the supposedly limited, domestic or mindlessly pleasure-seeking, commercially driven interests of their female audiences. It demonstrates too that, far from predictable and homogenous in outlook, interwar women’s magazines were marked by differences in substance, scope, and readership, and characterized by tensions between conservatism and radicalism, and between traditionalism and innovation. Responses to the present moment and its social and cultural conditions in each of these titles oscillated between delight, bewilderment, scepticism, fear, amusement, and critique. In Modern Print Artefacts (2016), Patrick Collier argues for the value of commercial print culture of the modernist era, which ‘gave virtually everyone who wanted it access to literature’, and proposes ‘an opening up of the entire range of print culture in the early twentieth century to scholarly interest and inquiry’.6 Collier contends ‘it is imperative that we do a great deal more reading of artefacts that cannot reasonably be defined as modernist’, and that we do so without ‘stretching the umbrella of modernism’ infinitely to redefine recovered works ‘as (previously unacknowledged, ingeniously delineated) kinds of modernism’ thereby ‘reiterating the term’s status as the rubric for the period’.7 Kristin Bluemel has similarly lamented ‘the apparent colonisation of virtually all areas of study of twentieth-century literary cultural activity by the “New Modernist Studies”’, which ‘has ensured that whatever is not modernism will function as modernism’s other’.8 The periodicals selected for investigation in this book have been chosen due to their publication of modernist writers and attention to avant-garde culture, but they are clearly not themselves modernist and they open up to enquiry an array of writers, editors, and textual and visual material that are of interest without being formally experimental. These magazines also valuably display modernism in circulation among broader interwar literary culture. My analysis in Chapter 3, for example, uncovered essays and fiction by modernist and middlebrow women writers in Good Housekeeping, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar that reflect provocatively on the social conditions of modernity in ways that work against the dominant patriarchal, consumerist, and heteronormative ideologies of these magazines. Reading across a sample

178 Coda of women’s magazine writing by Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Margaret Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia Woolf in the context of these periodicals’ routine content, this chapter demonstrated how modernism existed within broader undercurrents of feminist resistance and textual play that can be identified in these magazines. This chapter suggests the radical potential of commercial, feminized periodical texts to trouble the critical categories of ‘highbrow’, ‘lowbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, and ‘modernist’ that continue to inform the scholarly narratives through which we analyse early twentieth- century writers and their works. Rediscovering modernism in these middlebrow women’s magazines resituates it in dialogue with the wider culture of which it was a part. In interwar Vogue, Eve, and Harper’s Bazaar, as Chapter 2 explained, modernism was received and understood first and foremost through the discourses of fashion that directed the routine content and outlook of these glossy magazines. The exchange between modernism and fashion is evident in their fashion illustration and in overlaps in rhetoric between their fashion copy, advertising, and commentary on modernist art and literature. This second chapter explored these magazines’ privileging of novelty, originality, exclusivity, and sophistication in both their fashion content and their treatment of modernism. It showed that fashion magazines were invested in establishing and sustaining cultural hierarchies between the elite and the masses even as they traversed them. Chapter 4 similarly observed the importance of modernism’s highbrow status and symbolic value to the emergence of modernist celebrities in Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar in the interwar years. These magazines participated in and fuelled the systems of celebrity through which modernist writers and artists became well known. This chapter drew attention to reciprocal relationships between modernist writers and women’s magazines. As Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein capitalized on the opportunities presented by women’s periodicals to extend their writing to new audiences, the magazines exploited the high cultural capital associated with these rising modernist stars. Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar presented modernist personalities at ease within a highly commodified women’s culture and packaged modernist reputations for their female readers’ consumption. The appearance of modernism in commercial women’s magazines troubles and expands our understanding of modernism’s audiences, its spread beyond the high cultural sphere, and its treatment by mainstream publics. Women’s magazines can be said to epitomize the ‘increasingly consuming and engulfing’ feminized mass culture that Andreas Huyssen once famously posited that modernism ‘constituted itself’ against through ‘a conscious strategy of exclusion’.9 The presence of modernism in these four women’s periodicals and their active engagement with modernist culture disrupts not only the notion of an opposition between

Coda  179 modernism and popular culture but also the gendering of these fields of cultural production. Following several decades of revisionist scholarship, as Matthew Levay has observed, Huyssen’s ‘“great divide” […] has by now been traversed so many times as to seem like something of a critical straw man, invoked only to be dismissed’.10 Evidently, Woolf and Stein, and a range of other modernists addressed in this book, including T. S. Eliot, Roger Fry, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Edith Sitwell, were not adverse to publication or publicization in British women’s fashion and domestic magazines. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines extends from and continues the new modernist studies’ assault on the myth of modernism’s isolation from mass print culture, but it also complicates the picture by tracing how commercial women’s periodicals that paid attention to modernism in the interwar years both challenged and were complicit in creating the cultural hierarchies that elevated modernism above other cultural forms. Interwar British Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar were not simply passive containers for modernist content, but actively participated in the construction of modernism’s public profile. These long-neglected periodical texts have much to tell us about the ways in which women navigated modernity in the interwar years and the ways in which mainstream female readerships navigated modernism.

Notes 1 Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 236. 2 Ibid., pp. 238, 243. 3 Paul Delany, Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 150. 4 Ibid., p. 6. 5 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 25. 6 Patrick Collier, Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890–1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 232, 234. 7 Ibid., p. 234 (emphasis in original). 8 Kristin Bluemel, ‘Introduction: What Is Intermodernism?’, in Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. by Kristin Bluemel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 1–18 (p. 2). 9 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. vii. 10 Matthew Levay, ‘Remaining a Mystery: Gertrude Stein, Crime Fiction and Popular Modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature, 36.4 (2013), 1–22 (p. 5).

Appendices

Primary Sources and Their Locations

The lists below enable quick reference to key information about the four women’s magazines that comprise this book’s primary sources. Materials drawn from these magazines are detailed in chapter endnotes. The locations where I have accessed these magazines are given below.

Vogue (UK) Dates: July 1916–present Frequency: Semi-monthly until 1927, then fortnightly Price at first publication: 1s Publisher: Condé Nast Editors in interwar period: Elspeth Champcommunal (1916–22), Dorothy Todd (1922–26), Alison Settle (1927–34), Elizabeth Penrose (1935–39) Circulation: 40–45,000 in 1938 Locations accessed: British Library, Bodleian Library, De Montfort University Archive

Eve Title: Eve until March 1921, then Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial Dates: November 1919–April 1929; then became Britannia and Eve Frequency: Monthly until March 1920, then weekly Price at first publication: 1s Publisher: The Sphere and Tatler Ltd. (later Illustrated London News Ltd.) Editor/s: Edward Huskinson (1919-?), after February 1920 undisclosed Circulation: Unknown Locations accessed: British Library, Bodleian Library

Good Housekeeping (UK) Dates: March 1922–present Frequency: Monthly

182  Appendices Price at first publication: 1s Publisher: National Magazine Company (Hearst UK) Editors in interwar period: J. Y. McPeake (1922–24); Alice M. Head (1924–39) Circulation: 150,000 in 1922; 144,479 in 1924; 123,000 in 1938 Locations accessed: British Library, Bodleian Library, De Montfort University Archive

Harper’s Bazaar (UK) Dates: October 1929–1970 Frequency: Monthly Price at first publication: 2s Publisher: National Magazine Company (Hearst UK) Editor in interwar period: Phyllis Joyce Reynolds (1929–45) Circulation: 35–40,000 in 1938 Locations accessed: British Library, Bodleian Library

Good Housekeeping’s Reading Questionnaire (1929)

Information about the readers of interwar women’s magazines and their reading habits is scarce. At the end of 1928, Good Housekeeping (UK) invited its readers to participate in a survey of their reading, including periodicals, poetry, and fiction. In March 1929, the magazine published ‘The Result of Our Reading Questionnaire’ (Figure A.1), which is transcribed in full below. The total number of respondents was not disclosed.

‘The Result of Our Reading Questionnaire’, Good Housekeeping, March 1929, pp. 35, 141, 142, 144. A large number of readers of GOOD HOUSEKEEPING were kind enough to reply to the Reading Questionnaire published in our Christmas Number, with the result that we have been able to form an extremely accurate idea of the kind of literature read by intelligent women of the educated class. The result of the Questionnaire is remarkably definite, the favourites in each class being well ahead of other publications in the same class. There were no real surprises; we have merely been confirmed in the views we have for some time held. This analysis will be of great use to us in arranging future advertising appropriations. Seventy-seven per cent. of the answers received came from England; of these 13 per cent. were from London, and a very good percentage from Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham. Nine per cent. of the total came from Scotland, 7 per cent. from Ireland, 5 per cent. from Wales, and 2 per cent. from foreign readers. At the time of going to press, answers to this Questionnaire are still being received in considerable quantities, and very few of our foreign subscribers have had time to reply at all, but we did not feel able to defer publishing the result for another month. We shall probably continue to receive answers to the Questionnaire for the next six months. The questions were as follows: 1. Which daily newspapers do you take regularly? 2. Which Sunday newspapers? 3. Religious papers? 4. Weekly reviews?

184  Appendices 5.  Magazines? 6. Any other periodicals? 7. Do you read poetry? 8. Which are your favourite novelists? 9. Any comments you care to make?

Figure A.1 ‘The Result of Our Reading Questionnaire’, Good Housekeeping, March 1929.

Appendices  185 The “Daily Mail” heads the list of daily newspapers with a reader percentage of 37.01. “The Times” is a very good second, with a percentage of 20.13, and the complete list is as follows: Daily Newspapers

Percentage

Daily Mail

37.01

The Times

20.13

Daily Express

13.64

Daily Sketch

12.33

Daily News and Westminster Gazette

11.6

Daily Mirror

9.74

Morning Post

8.44

Evening Standard

7.79

Daily Telegraph

6.5

Manchester Guardian

5.8

Evening News

4.5

Daily Herald

3.9

Liverpool Post and Mercury Yorkshire Evening Post

3.2

Glasgow Herald The Scotsman

2.6

Daily Chronicle Newcastle Daily Journal

1.95

Belfast News Letter Birmingham Daily Post Birmingham Mail Bulletin Evening Chronicle Irish Times Liverpool Echo

1.3

Less than 1 per cent.: Aberdeen Journal, Birmingham Evening Dispatch, Birmingham Gazette, Bristol Times and Mirror, Dispatch, Dundee Courier, Glasgow Evening Citizen, Irish Independent, Lancashire Daily Post, Manchester Evening Chronicle, Manchester Evening News, Northern Echo, Nottingham Guardian, South Wales Echo, Sporting Chronicle, Western Mail, Western Morning Mail, Yorkshire Herald. Question Two was— Which Sunday newspapers do you take? The “Observer” is a triumphant first with a percentage of readers of 33.1, the “Dispatch” a good second with a percentage of 20.8.

186  Appendices The complete list is as follows: Sunday Newspapers

Percentage

Observer

33.1

Dispatch

20.8

Sunday Pictorial

18.1

Sunday Times

16.2

Sunday Express

11.6

Graphic

5.8

Sunday Chronicle

4.5

Sunday Post

2.6

People

1.95

Christian Herald

1.3

Less than 1 per cent.: Empire News, Mercury, News of the World, New York Times, Referee, Sunday Circle, Sunday Herald, Sunday Independent, Sunday News. Twenty-five per cent. do not take any Sunday newspapers, some on principle and some because they live in districts where they are unprocurable until very late in the day. Question Three was— What Religious Papers do you take? Parish Magazines head this list with a percentage of 14.3, and the “British Weekly” is second with a percentage of 8.44. The complete list is as follows: Religious Papers

Percentage

Parish Magazines British Weekly

14.3 8.44

Church Times

5.8

The Christian

3.25

Methodist Recorder The Record Universe

2.6

Modern Churchman Mothers’ Union Magazine Scots Observer St. Martin’s Review

1.95

Christian Science Journal Christian World Congregation The Friend Inquirer

1.3

Appendices  187 Less than 1 per cent.: African Tidings, Church of Scotland Monthly, The Cross, The Far East, The Guardian, Healing Church, Highways and Hedges, Home Words, Irish Catholic, Irish Rosary, Life and Work, Life’s Work, Light, Methodist Times, Liverpool Diocesan Review, Millennial Star, Missionary Outlook, The Mission Field, Mother and Union Journal, Movement, Other Lands, Our Own Magazine, Presbyterian Monthly Messenger, Rationalist, Scottish Congregational, The Sentinel, Standard, The Student, The Torch, Woman’s Work, You and I. Question Four was— What Weekly Reviews do you take? “John o’ London’s Weekly” was a good first in this section, with a percentage of 18.8; the “Spectator” was second with a percentage of 11.6; “Britannia” third with a percentage of 9.74; and “The Times Literary Supplement” fourth with a percentage of 9.00. The complete list is as follows: Weekly Reviews

Percentage

John o’ London’s Weekly Spectator

18.8 11.6

Britannia

9.74

Times Literary Supplement

9

T. P.’s Weekly

7.7

New Statesman

7.1

Radio Times

6.5

Outline

3.9

Nursery World

3.2

The Illustrated London News Times Educational Supplement

2.6

The Nation Time and Tide Woman’s Leader

1.95

Saturday Review Weekly Scotsman

1.3

Less than 1 per cent.: Cassell’s Weekly, Electrical Review, Everybody’s Weekly, Family Herald, Football Leaders, Football Post, G. K. C.’s Weekly, Graphic, Irish Statesman, John Bull, Labour Weekly, London Calling, Medical Opinion, Mercury, Motor and Electrical Review, National Association Review, Nineteenth Century, Scottish Educational Journal, Socialist Review, Stage, Swedish Papers, Truth, Wakefield Express, Weekly Telegraph. Question Five was—

188  Appendices What Magazines do you take? Everyone, of course, took GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, or else they would not have received the Questionnaire to fill up. “Punch” has been included in this section, and heads the list with the excellent percentage of 31.1. “Woman’s Journal” is a good second with a percentage of 20.8, followed closely by “Nash’s” with a percentage of 20.13. The complete list is as follows: Magazines

Percentage

Punch Woman’s Journal Nash’s Strand Vogue Woman and Home The Tatler Chambers’ Blackwood’s Geographical Home Ladies’ Home Journal Girl’s Own Paper & Woman’s Magazine Quiver Pall Mall Windsor Home Notes Modern Woman Home & Gardens Pearson’s Weekly The Queen

31.1 20.8 20.13 8.44 7.7 7.1 6.5 5.8 5.2

Argosy Child Education Home Chat Humorist My Magazine Studio Woman’s Pictorial Answers Child Pictorial Discovery G.F.S. & Y.M.C.A. Harper’s Monthly Hutchinson’s London Opinion Mab’s Fashions My Home Picture Show Saturday Evening Post Sphere Tit-Bits

4.5 3.9 3.2 2.6

1.95

1.3

Appendices  189 Less than 1 per cent.: British Empire, Country Life, Delineator, Eve, Happy, History, Home and County, Ideal Home, Irish Sketch, Lady, Merry, Modern Priscilla, New, Our Home, Passing Show, Pearson’s, Pencil Points, Popular Science, Short Stories, Sketch, Story Teller, Twentieth Century, Wide World, Woman’s Life, Woman’s Outlook, Wonderful Britain, World To-day, Universal History of the World. The next class related to any other periodicals, of which the “Bookman” and “Headway” tied for the first position, with a percentage of 5.2. The list is as follows, and includes an extraordinary variety of literature: Other Periodicals

Percentage

Bookman Headway

5.2

Amateur Gardening

3.2

The Autocar Children’s Newspaper Fortnightly Review Gardening Illustrated Life and Letters The Motor Popular Gardening

1.95

Cornhill Guider London Mercury Musical Opinion New Leader Review of Reviews The Schoolmaster Town Crier World Radio

1.3

Less than 1 per cent.: The Animal World, The Austin Magazine, Barnardo’s Magazine, Church Overseas Quarterly, Civil Service Journal, Colour, Cycling Gazette, Dublin Opinion, Educational Outlook, English Review, Estate Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Girl Guide’s Gazette, Gramophone Gazette, The Imp, Iron Age, Labour Leader, Landmark, Le Jardin des Modes, Les Lettres, The Linguist, Little Folks, Lyrica, Missionary Magazine, Montreal Herald, Motor News, Musical Times, The Music Teacher, National Review, New Age, New Health, The Old Lady, Our Dogs, Our Lady, Parents’ Review, Pictorial Education, R.A.S.C. Journal, School Days, Scottish Naturalist, S.G. Stamp Monthly, Shooting Times, Stockbreeder, Survey, Teacher’s World, Time and Money, World’s Children, The Writer. In regard to the next question – Do you read Poetry? – 75 per cent. of our readers answered the question in the affirmative.

190  Appendices The question relating to novelists produced some very interesting results. Among the classics, Dickens heads the list with a percentage of 21.4, Jane Austen second with 16.9. The complete list is as follows: Novelists Classics

Percentage

Dickens Jane Austen Brontë Scott Thackeray G. Eliot Dumas Trollope Victor Hugo Meredith R. L. Stevenson Tolstoy

21.4 16.9 8.44 6.5 5.8 3.2 2.6

Gaskell Charles Reade

1.3

1.95

Less than 1 per cent.: Borrow, Carlyle, Fielding, Ruskin. Among the moderns, John Galsworthy has a remarkable lead, with a percentage of 40.26. Hugh Walpole is second with a percentage of 18.1, and Warwick Deeping and W. J. Locke very nearly tie for the third place, with Robert Hitchens following close behind. The complete list is as follows: Novelists Moderns

Percentage

John Galsworthy

40.26

Hugh Walpole

18.1

Warwick Deeping

16.9

W. J. Locke

16.2

Robert Hitchens

11.0

Thomas Hardy

10.4

John Buchan S. Kaye-Smith H. G. Wells

9.7

Appendices  191 Rose Macaulay

9.0

Kipling

7.7

Arnold Bennett Philip Gibbs

7.1

O. Douglas

6.5

Maud Diver Edgar Wallace

5.2

Jeffery Farnol

4.5

Conrad Elizabeth G. B. Stern

3.9

James Barrie A. S. M. Hutchinson P. C. Wren

3.2

Sinclair Lewis Compton Mackenzie Mary Webb Wodehouse Dornford Yates

2.6

Two hundred other names received less than 1 per cent. of votes. Comments by our readers were on the whole interesting and gratifying. There was a general unanimity of opinion that reading in the train was bad for the eyesight. One person described the “Daily Mail” as the best paper for unconscious humour. Several others take the “Dispatch” mainly for Viola Tree’s articles. Many readers expressed likings for memoirs, biographies, and letters. A good many were kind enough to send congratulations of GOOD HOUSEKEEPING Christmas Number. Clemance Dane’s articles came in for a considerable amount of appreciation, and so did those of Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Jessica Cosgrave, and St. John Ervine. Quite a number wished that we had included a question relating to plays. In conclusion, we wish to express our most cordial thanks to all readers who were kind enough to fill up this Questionnaire and send it in.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. advertising 8–9, 11, 26–8, 31–2, 35–7, 39, 43–4, 46–7, 49–51, 54–5, 58, 63n71, 67, 70, 116–20, 124, 166, 168 Aldington, Richard 6, 54, 86–7, 94, 109, 142–4, 170n5 androgyny 40–1, 121, 150 architecture 50, 58, 86, 95, 149 art deco 55, 70–1, 95, 123 Ballet Russes 42, 59, 74–5, 87–90 Beaton, Cecil 30, 90, 151, 158 Beck, Maurice 142–3, 146, 150–4, 170n3 Bell, Clive 5, 83–4, 149–50 Bell, Vanessa 5, 149–50, 153 Belloc, Hilaire 106–7 Benjamin, Walter 69 Bennett, Arnold 107, 113, 158 Benson, Stella 87, 89 Beresford, J. D. 43 Bergson, Henri 75, 92 Bloomfield, Paul 40, 87, 154–5, 173n67 Bloomsbury Group 5–6, 29, 83–5, 99, 147–54; satire of 96, 157–8 Bonham Carter, Violet 43, 109, 191 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 72, 78 Bowen, Elizabeth 58, 89, 109, 112, 122, 124, 127–9, 135 Bowker, K. K. 123–4 Bradley, William 165, 169 Braque, Georges 84, 87 Britannia and Eve 37, 63n79 Brittain, Vera 109–10 Brockhurst, Gerald L. 76 Brodovitch, Alexey 55–6, 72, 92, 94, 98

Brown, Ivor 52, 54 Burrage, A. M. 121 celebrity culture 27–8, 32, 34, 37, 39–40, 52, 57, 87, 89, 95–6, 107–8, 126, 129, 134, 142–4, 146, 148–70, 178–9; critical discussion of celebrity and modernism 4, 7, 144–6 Chagall, Marc 84, 98 Champcommunal, Elspeth 27, 29, 31, 149, 172n33 Chase, Edna Woolman 26–7, 29–30, 72, 83, 90 class 5, 7, 8–9, 12–13, 26, 32, 35, 39–40, 41–2, 44, 49, 52, 54–5, 58–60, 72–3, 85, 107, 119, 129, 146, 155–8 Cocteau, Jean 29, 74, 87, 90, 96 consumerism 5, 8–12, 24–6, 31–2, 35, 39, 42–4, 46–51, 54–5, 58, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 176; critique of 116–20, 131; see also advertising Coomaraswamy, Ananda 74, 101n36 cosmopolitanism 58–9; responses to 157, 161–2 cubism 71, 74, 76, 84–5, 95–8 Dali, Salvador 98 dance 28, 35, 42, 60, 74–5, 85–6, 89, 90, 121, 125 Dane, Clemance (Winifred Ashton) 43, 48, 64n108, 109, 191 Delafield, E. M. 43, 54, 108, 122–4 Diaghilev, Sergei 87–8 Dobson, Frank 33, 83, 85, 97 domesticity 11, 25, 28, 31, 36, 42, 44–50, 113–6, 166, 176

206 Index dress see fashion Drian, Etienne 70, 101n19 Druten, John van 123 Eastman, Max 97, 101n36, 108 Eliot, T. S. 77, 86, 142–4, 146, 170n5, 171n6 Ellis, H. Havelock 87 Empire Marketing Board 50–1 English nationalism 50 Epstein, Jacob 33, 78, 80, 95, 168 Erté 55–7, 70 Ervine, St. John 48, 191 Eve/Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial 1–2, 6, 9, 12, 23n105, 24, 34–42, 68–70, 73–5, 79–83, 87–90, 99–100, 107–9, 120–2, 124–9, 134–5, 146, 154–6, 161, 170, 176–9, 181; advertising in 35–7, 39; arts coverage 36, 37, 41–2, 74–5, 79–81, 87–90, 99–100, 125; artwork 35, 39, 70, 87–8; circulation 37; editorship 34, 62n62; fashion pages 39, 69–70, 79; fiction 37, 108, 120–2, 124–9, 135; foundation of 34; frequency 35; readership 12, 14, 36, 120; size and format 35–7; literary coverage 36–7, 40–1, 81–3, 87–9, 146–7, 154–6; society pages 36–40, 126, 129, 146 expressionism 81, 91, 95 fashion 4, 5–6, 8, 24–5, 33–4, 67–8, 99–100, 143–4, 168, 176–8; critical discussion of fashion and modernism 4, 67–9, 76–8, 85, 92–4, 99; fashion content in magazines 27–36, 39–42, 48, 54–8, 67–74, 79, 91–4, 124, 161, 164; interwar trends in appearance and dress 32, 39–41, 57–8, 60, 71, 74, 121, 150, 153; theories of 67–9, 72–3, 78, 99 fashion illustration 27, 28–9, 31, 55, 57, 70–1, 98 fashion photography 29, 55–6, 70–2, 92–4, 98 fauvism 77–8, 95, 98 Fish, Anne Harriet (‘FISH’) 29, 34, 62n63, 78, 79 Flight, Claude 163–4 Forbes, Rosita 58–9, 107 Ford, Ford Madox 58 Fry, Roger 5, 74, 83, 85, 149–50, 168, 172n33 futurism 74, 80–1, 84, 95, 102n39

Galsworthy, John 13, 43, 108, 112, 123, 190 Garbutt, P. L. 45, 49–50 Gazette du Bon Ton, La 70, 101n18 Gibbons, Stella 43, 112 Good Housekeeping Institute and Seal of Approval 42, 49–50 Good Housekeeping (UK edition) 2, 6–7, 9, 12–14, 23n105, 24, 42–51, 107–20, 134–5, 146; advertising in 16–17, 43–4, 46–7, 51, 118–19, 156–8, 170, 176–9, 181–2, 183–91; careers column 46, 116–18; circulation 43; domestic content 42–50, 115–19; editorship 42; essays 43, 107, 109–20; fiction 43, 108; foundation of 9, 42; readership 12–14, 44; size and format 43–4, 46; visual content 45, 46–7 Good Housekeeping (US edition) 42 gossip 9, 28, 34, 57, 80, 96, 146, 161, 163, 168–9; see also celebrity culture Grant, Duncan 83, 95, 149–50, 153 Gray, Colin 82–3 H. D. 86 Hall, Radclyffe 40–1, 89; ‘The Scarecrow’ 124–7, 139n104 Hammond, Aubrey 52, 161 Harper’s Bazaar (UK edition) 1–2, 9, 12, 16–17, 23n105, 24, 51–60, 67–70, 72–3, 90–100, 107–8, 120– 4, 129–35, 146–7, 158–70, 176–9, 182; advertising in 16–17, 54–5, 58, 166, 168; arts coverage 54, 59, 73, 91–2, 94–9; artwork 55–7, 70, 72, 92–6, 165–7; circulation 54; editorship 52, 55; essays 54, 58–9, 107, 161–3; fashion pages 54–5, 58, 69–70, 72–3, 92–4, 161, 164; fiction 54, 57–9, 108, 120–4, 129–34, 158–60, 163–4; foundation of 9, 51–2; readership 12, 54; size and format 52, 54–7; society pages 57, 59, 134, 146 Harper’s Bazaar (US edition) 51 Head, Alice 42–3, 110 Hearst, William Randolph 6, 42, 51, 108 Hepworth, Barbara 54, 95, 97 Holtby, Winifred 43, 48, 51, 89, 107, 120 homosexuality 5, 29–30, 132–4, 152–3

Index  207 Hoppé, E. O. 32, 170n4 housewife, the 11, 25, 42, 44–6, 48–50, 114–16 Hoyningen-Huene, George 72 Hoyt, Nancy 123 Huskinson, Edward 34, 63n76 Huskinson, Richard King see King, Richard Huxley, Aldous 29–30 impressionism 78, 82, 85, 95, 97 Jameson, Storm 87, 89, 109, 116–20, 122, 134–5 Joyce, James 90, 96, 161 Kauffer, Edward McKnight 87, 150, 152 Kettelwell, John 87–8 King, Richard 36, 38, 40–1, 63n76, 87, 155 Lawrence, D. H. 30, 82–3, 89, 121 Le Corbusier 29, 95 Lehmann, Rosamund 87 Lepape, Georges 27, 31, 70 Leslie, Seymour 58–9 Lewis, D. B. Wyndham 161–4 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 84, 90 literary celebrity see celebrity culture Lynd, Sylvia 54, 58, 160 Macaulay, Rose 13, 107, 111–16, 120–1, 134–5 Macgregor, Helen 142–3, 146, 150–4, 170n3 Mackenzie, Faith 39 magazines see periodicals Man Ray 55, 93–4, 165–6 Mansfield, Katherine 82–3 Martin, Charles 70 Mathieu, Beatrice 92–4 Matisse, Henri 77–8, 85, 90, 98, 102n57, 154 Maugham, W. Somerset 43, 54, 112, 122 menstruation see sanitary pads Meynell, Viola 54 middle class see class middlebrow 4–5, 7, 54, 58–9, 68, 79, 84–5, 107, 112, 116, 122, 135, 177–8 Mitford, Nancy 54 Modigliani, Amedeo 27, 77–8 Moral, Jean 57

Morand, Paul 30, 86 Morris, Margaret 85, 125, 140n108 Mortimer, Raymond 5, 83–6, 99, 149–50, 154 Moszkowski, Alexander 80–1 motor sport 41 Mottram, R. H. 1 Muir, Edwin 86, 173n59 Muriel Abbott dancers 125 Nash, Paul 95 Nast, Condé 4, 26–7, 29–30, 70, 90 Nevinson, C. R. W. 80, 95–7 New Yorker, The 73, 84, 161 Nichols, Beverley 107, 157 Nicolson, Ben 90, 98 Nicolson, Harold 54, 58, 95 Normanton, Helena 46, 48, 109–10, 115 nostalgia 31–3, 50, 60, 69, 151 O’Brien, Kate 58 Omega Workshop 83, 149 pacifist internationalism 46, 51 Parker, Dorothy 54, 107 periodicals: interwar women’s periodical culture 1–2, 6–10, 13–14, 24–5, 60; mass print media 8–9, 106–8, 144–5; methods of study 14–17; and modernism 3–7; scholarly approaches to women’s magazines 7–8, 11–13; see also Eve/Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial; Good Housekeeping (UK edition); Harper’s Bazaar (UK edition); Vogue (UK edition) Picasso, Pablo 74, 77, 84–5, 90, 96–8, 165–6 Poiret, Paul 33–4, 90 Porter, Cole 54 post-impressionism 77, 83–5, 95, 97, 149 Pound, Ezra 77, 90 Priestley, J. B. 52 race 12–13, 44 Reynolds, P. Joyce 52, 54, 130, 165, 169 Rhondda, Lady 110 Rice, Elmer 87 Richardson, Dorothy 81–2 romance fiction 9, 48, 59, 107–8, 120–1, 127, 132

208 Index Sackville-West, Vita 54, 86, 106, 131–4, 153 sanitary pads 25, 51 Sassoon, Siegfried 54 Satie, Erik 74, 87 Satterthwaite, Phyllis H. 39 Sayers, Dorothy L. 122 sculpture 33, 78, 80, 95, 97 Settle, Alison 30 sexuality 5, 10, 29–30, 59, 121, 123, 125, 127–9, 132–4, 150–3; female sexuality 59, 125–9; promiscuity 59, 121, 123, 127; sexual nonconformity 5, 29–30, 132–4, 150, 152–3 Seymour, Beatrice Kean 43, 109–10 Sheridan, Clare 1 Simmel, Georg 69, 72, 99 Sitwell, Edith 6, 30, 42, 54, 85–7, 89–90, 109, 150, 152–3, 170n3; Façade 85–6 Sitwell, Osbert 29, 42, 54, 87, 150, 152–3 Sitwell, Sacheverell 29, 42, 150, 152–3 Smith, Jessie Willcox 46–7 Snow, Carmel 55, 72 sophistication 6, 33, 37, 52–3, 57–60, 67–8, 72–6, 79–80, 84, 92, 96, 99, 131, 147, 163–4 Strachey, Lytton 87, 150 Stravinsky, Igor 87 Steichen, Edward 71–2 Stein, Gertrude 29, 54, 86, 90–2, 96, 98, 145, 160–70, 179; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 164–9; ‘Left to Right’ 95, 163–4 Stern, G. B. 30, 190 surrealism 72, 84, 89, 92, 95, 97–8 Swinnerton, Frank 52, 54, 107, 109 tennis 25, 37, 39 Time and Tide 14, 155 Todd, Dorothy 4, 5–6, 27, 29–30, 83–4, 86–7, 90, 104n131, 107, 143, 148–50, 154 Townsend Warner, Sylvia 86, 89, 155 travel 30, 35, 51, 55, 57–9, 123–4 Tremayne, Sydney 41, 85 Troly-Curtin, Marthe 36, 121

Van Dongen, Kees 79, 96 Vanity Fair 4, 7, 29, 53, 62n63, 68, 73–4, 84, 87, 101n36, 136n9, 145, 150, 163, 169 Vassilieff, Marie 89–90 ‘Vogue’ (revue), 33–4 Vogue (UK edition) 2, 4–7, 9, 12, 23n105, 24, 26–34, 67–79, 81–7, 90, 99–100, 107–8, 125, 142–4, 146–54, 161, 170, 170n3, 176–9, 181; advertising in 28, 31–2, 34, 70; arts coverage 28–30, 33–4, 73–9, 84–7, 90, 99–100, 109, 149–50; artwork 27–9, 31, 70–72; circulation 29, 30; editorship 27, 29–31, 148–50; fashion pages 27–32, 34, 70–2, 74, 99, 164; foundation of 9, 26–7; frequency 30; ‘Hall of Fame’ 29, 87, 150–3; literary coverage 28–30, 81–3, 86, 90, 142–4, 146–54, 170; readership 12, 14; size and format 27–9; society pages 28, 32, 146 Vogue (US edition) 26–7, 33, 102n39 vorticism 95, 97 Wadsworth, Edward 83, 90 Walpole, Hugh 13, 108 Waugh, Evelyn 54, 59, 96–7, 112, 123 West, Rebecca 43, 87, 109, 110, 112 Wharton, Edith 35, 89 Wilenski, R. H. 54, 90, 95, 97 Wilkinson, Ellen 43, 110 Wolfe, Humbert 30, 90 women’s citizenship 10, 24–5, 45–6, 50–1, 109–10, 176–7 Woolf, Leonard 86, 150, 153–5 Woolf, Virginia 2, 5, 43, 68, 86–7, 89–90, 98, 106, 109, 111, 135, 147–60, 170, 170n3, 173n67, 173n78, 179; ‘In the Looking Glass’ 129–31, 158–9; The London Scene 111, 136–7n20, 156–7; in Vogue 5–6, 86, 148–54; ‘The Waxworks at the Abbey’ 155–6, 173n73 World War I 9, 27, 119, 149; social shifts following 10, 50, 119, 121, 176