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Off to the Pictures STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 1 04/03/2016 13:29 STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 2 04/03/2016 13:29 Off to the Pictures Cinema-going, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain Lisa Stead STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 3 04/03/2016 13:29 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Lisa Stead, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9488 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9489 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1395 4 (epub) The right of Lisa Stead to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 4 04/03/2016 13:29 Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Off to the Pictures: Cinema, Fiction and Interwar Culture 8 2 Screen Fantasies: Tie-ins and the Short Story 32 3 Middlebrow Modernity: Class, Cinema-going and Selfhood 69 4 Wander, Watch, Repeat: Jean Rhys and Cinema 93 5 Film Talk: C. A. Lejeune and the Female Film Critic 127 6 Elinor Glyn: Intermedial Romance and Authorial Stardom 156 Afterword 189 Bibliography 199 Index 000 STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 5 04/03/2016 13:29 Figures 1.1 Comic postcard circa 1929 28 1.2 Comic postcard circa 1930s 29 2.1 An early cover for Girls’ Cinema, featuring Rudolph Valentino’s life story 37 2.2 The opening instalment of the original serial ‘The Girl Who Dared’ 50 2.3 The Violet Novels cover featuring Jean Harlowe 54 2.4 Cover of the 1927 Scala Tatler, featuring stories written by Lilian Laine 57 2.5 Beth Mavor’s ‘The Cinema Star’, part of the Smart Novels series, no. 1,990 60 4.1 The Court Cinema, Tottenham Court Road, at the junction with Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, as it appeared in 1927 103 4.2 Cinema-going stereotypes from a Bamforth & Co. ‘Comic’ Series postcard, circa 1930 105 4.3 The Three Fingered Kate episode ‘The Case of the Chemical Fumes’ adapted as a short story for the British fan magazine The Pictures, 17 August 1912 116 6.1 ‘I’M NOT A FILM STAR, BUT I’VE CERTAINLY GOT IT!’ postcard 162 6.2 An illustrated cigarette-card profile of Elinor Glyn 163 STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 6 04/03/2016 13:29 Acknowledgements I would like to thank everyone who encouraged and advised me across the process of writing this book. I am grateful to those who offered helpful comments at conferences, talked through ideas and helped me to see new angles on the material. I thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the research scholarships that helped set me on the initial path for this project. Thank you to Gillian Leslie at Edinburgh University Press (EUP) for her interest in and support with the proposal, to the anonymous readers who gave invaluable commentary at this early stage, to the final reader whose feedback was so encouraging and to Richard Strachan and Rebecca Mackenzie for all their assistance. I am grateful to the archivists and curators who have been generous with their time and expertise, particularly those at the British Library, the Women’s Library @ LSE (the London School of Economics and Political Science), Reading Special Collections, the British Film Institute (BFI), the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, and the University of Exeter Heritage Collections. I am grateful also to mentors, former teachers and past and present colleagues for their invaluable perspectives and general good wishes – especially Steve Neale, Nick Hall and Jana Funke. My thanks go most particularly to Carrie Smith, who has offered a great deal of time with proofreading, good advice, moral support and friendship across the life of this project. Thanks also to Kate Saunders for a long afternoon in Boston Tea Party mulling over an initial proposal, and to Duncan Carson for his words of wisdom and keen editorial eye on the final draft. I especially want to thank Helen Hanson and Phil Wickham for the time, encouragement and friendship they have given me. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their support and enthusiasm, and for putting up with me. STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 7 04/03/2016 13:29 For CRS. STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 8 04/03/2016 13:29 Introduction ‘Where i’you going, Ma?’ gasped George. ‘The pictures!’ She might have been saying ‘The Devil.’ And to the pictures she went, catching the afternoon bus to Kiplington. W. Holtby1 The movies, and going to the movies, were for many British women an integral part of their experience of modernity. ‘The pictures’ as both a representational media and everyday leisure activity was intertwined in the changing fabric of women’s everyday lives between the world wars. The street, the shop, what you read, how you dressed – these things were increasingly coded for and by women through mass culture, and in no small part by cinema. Cinema intersected with changing relationships between work and play, the relationship between the sexes in public and private spaces, the movement of bodies within these spaces and ways of thinking about the self through dress, cosmetics, dance, advertising and shopping. This was the period in which fleapits were overtaken by purpose-built picture-palaces and super-cinemas. Feature films came to dominate exhibition, and sound eclipsed the silent film. It was also a time in which British cinema-going was progressively geared towards women. If pre-war cinema had attracted a more working-class, mixed-gender audience base, it now extended its address to a feminised and more middle-class consumer. Cinema and the cinema programme became a much more established and embedded part of everyday British life for women. Film- going soon became, according to Iris Barry writing in the mid-1920s, ‘as standardized as a church service or a daily newspaper’ (1972 [1926]): 5). Alongside film, popular fiction was addressing a similar audience. Books were increasingly a commodity form as growing levels of literacy resulted in a larger reading public, and a rise in the price of printing costs helped push the primacy of the bestseller, reprints, cheap editions and paperback STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 1 04/03/2016 13:29 2 off to the pictures lists (St John 1990: 160). Woman-centred bestselling genres like the romance, the sex novel and the desert romance (perhaps most notably E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919), adapted to film by Famous Players Lasky in 1921), were consumed in great number by interwar readers. This book explores the intersection of these developments, examining the nexus between women and modernity, women and cinema and women and British interwar print culture. In doing so, the study navigates three core overlapping fields. The book primarily illuminates gendered cultures of movie cultures and cinema-going in interwar Britain, emphasising the social role of cinema in the early twentieth century. Exploring the literary production of this movie culture reveals a preoccupation with the figure of the female cinema-goer and her use of cinema spaces within women’s writ- ings, where characters such as Winifred Holtby’s cinema-going widower Mrs Brimsley, quoted above, pattern the pages of interwar female fictions. In exploring movie culture as it was produced through such literary modes, looking at novels, short stories, criticism and magazines among a range of other sources, the book raises a number of new questions. What roles did literature play in producing a female film culture from outside the film industry proper? What attention did this literature give to women’s uses of and responses to film fictions, cinema-going practices and cinema spaces? What do literary inflections of a gendered movie culture suggest about the roles that cinema played in informing and structuring notions of selfhood and self-fashioning for British women at this time? The book foregrounds a study of cinema and intermediality as the core framework through which to begin to answer these questions. Film, in this approach, cannot be considered separately from its interrelationship with other cultural forms: literary modes produce a culture of cinema in dialogue with film texts, and with the physical and social practices of film-going. Finally, and overarchingly, the study encloses these explora- tions within the wider field of women’s film history, and the evolving emphasis in feminist film historiography upon cinema-going and recep- tion. In doing so, it offers a new account of British movie culture in this period, distinct from existing scholarly explorations of American cinema audiences, and emphasises the social role of cinema in the early twentieth- century Britain. Looking at cinema-going and film viewing explicitly through literary texts and popular writing opens a distinctly new vantage point on the intermedial networks of movie culture, and their distinctly gendered modes of address. Recent critical work has begun to bring closer attention to the way that film and cinema cultures featured in different forms of writing: Laura Marcus has explored writing on cinema in the modernist period in STEAD 9780748694884 PRINT.indd 2 04/03/2016 13:29 introduction 3 The Tenth Muse (2007), while Andrew Shail’s work on cinema and stories, particularly his most recent collection Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896–1912 (2010), has examined how fiction was mobilised to reflect on the experience of early film and cinema-going.