SOFT METAFICTION(S): MARY STEWART AND THE SELF-REFLECTIVE MIDDLEBROW Faye Jessica Keegan Doctor of Philosophy School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics Submitted in June 2016 i ii ABSTRACT This thesis examines the romantic thrillers of Mary Stewart, which were internationally bestselling novels in the post-war British fiction marketplace. Through my reading of Stewart, I nuance current critical perceptions of the mid-twentieth century middlebrow novel, which, I argue, is characterised in part by a self-conscious investigation of its position within the parameters of highbrow literature and popular fiction. As a critical category which is defined by its relation to literary value, I argue that works considered to be middlebrow are inherently self- reflective and metafictive, seeking to discreetly undermine the hierarchical structures which attempt to contain them. I posit the term ‘soft-metafiction’ to describe this; as opposed to ‘hard’ metafiction, which explicitly and insistently proclaims its self-awareness, soft-metafiction is involved in an understated, often sub-textual, exploration of its status as text. I argue that Stewart’s work is characterised by frequent use of intertextual reference and metafictive reflection on the nature and purpose of text as a concept. In Chapter One, I discuss Stewart’s engagement with notions of canonicity and literary value, showing how she defends the reading of middlebrow fiction against such figures as Q.D. Leavis, and how she challenges the position of women within the masculinised canon. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate how Stewart reflects upon the generic conventions of romance, fairytale, crime and gothic fiction to raise questions about gender and genre. Chapter Three explores how Stewart reflects on the nature of texts, and how they function in relation to history (both personal and national), memory, and identity. Throughout, I demonstrate Stewart’s interest in the various ways that text is categorised: generically, hierarchically and canonically. In doing so, I demonstrate that Stewart’s novels are more than, as one reviewer writes, ‘charming little love stor[ies]’: rather, they are intellectually searching, self-aware works, with a serious interest in their wider literary context. By mapping Stewart’s work in terms of the soft-metafictive, I aim to open this term up as a wider area for study within the middlebrow, and to prompt a recalibration of critical understandings of the British fiction marketplace in the mid-twentieth century. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are a number of people who have helped in the production of this thesis. Many thanks go to my parents, Denver and Michael, for their unfailing love and support – emotional and otherwise – over the last four years and beyond, and to my siblings Luke and Sian. I am extremely grateful to my friends in the PG/ECR community at Newcastle, including Harriet Archer, Joe Barton, Pat Beesley, Bonny Brooks, John Challis, Katie Cooper, Zoe Cooper, Shelby Derbyshire, Katherine Farrimond, Claire Irving, Kris Johnson, Jess Kadow, Sadek Kessous, Tom Langley, Jon Quayle, Janelle Rodriques, Emma Short, Dave Spittle, Helen Stark, Marie Stern-Peltz, Leanne Stokoe, Beatrice Turner, and Barbara Williams, who have variously provided shelter, laughter, debate, guidance, coffee, cigarettes, beer, and Taylor Swift sing-alongs. I thank them each for their support and their friendship. I am also grateful to the staff in the School of English at Newcastle, particularly to Kirsten MacLeod and Ella Dzelzainis for their advice and encouragement in the early stages of my Ph.D., and to Meiko O’Halloran and Lucy Pearson for the same in the final stages. Thanks also go to Anne Whitehead, Sherelle Coulson, and Rowena Bryson. I thank my friends from beyond Newcastle University: Clare Whitewoods, for her friendship and her eagle eye; Harriet Lam and Jo Maddocks for family dinners and for giving me a home; Becca Paul, for sage advice and cups of tea; and Sally Fothergill and Hetty du Cros, whose friendship I treasure. This thesis would not have been possible without the help, advice and encouragement of my supervisor, Stacy Gillis. She has really gone above and beyond in her support of me, and I will be forever thankful for her kindness, patience, diligence and brilliance. Lastly, especial thanks go to my partner and best friend Nigel Buckley, who has ensured my survival through it all, and who makes me laugh every day. iv v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 ‘The Mother of Twentieth-Century Romantic Suspense’: 2 Mary Stewart’s ‘Romantic Thrillers’ ‘The Genuine Triumphs of a Minor Art’: 8 The Art of the Gendered Review ‘Betwixt and Between’: 15 The Middlebrow in the Mid-Twentieth Century Fiction upon (Meta)Fiction: 22 Feminist, Historiographic, ‘Soft’ Thesis Structure 27 CHAPTER ONE ‘SNOB VALUE’: WOMAN WRITERS, LITERARY VALUE AND THE MIDDLEBROW 31 ‘Awfully Good Material for Thinking With’: 38 Highbrow and Middlebrow Readers in Nine Coaches Waiting ‘A Benevolent Machiavelli’: 49 Shakespeare, the Canon, and Woman Writers in This Rough Magic ‘The Niminy-Piminy Ones’: 60 Woman Writers and the Historical Sense in My Brother Michael ‘The Same Old Material’: 72 Recycling and Repurposing Literature in The Wind off the Small Isles ‘The Displacing of our Idols’: 81 Woman Writers and the Western Canon CHAPTER TWO ‘TOUGH BOOKS’: GENDER, GENRE AND FEMALE PROTAGONISTS 84 ‘Defeat by a Woman’: 89 Reimagining the Romance Heroine in Madam, Will You Talk? vi ‘If I Had Been a Man…’: 98 Alternatives to Romance in The Moonspinners ‘The Case of the Vanishing Husband’: 107 Uncanny Marriage in Airs Above the Ground ‘An Enchanted Fortress to be Stormed’: 116 Mothers, Daughters, Heroes and Fairytales in Thunder on the Right ‘A Force and Dynamic Denied Most pre-1950s Heroines’: 127 Stewart’s Leading Ladies CHAPTER THREE 130 ‘UNROLL A NEW MEMORY’: HISTORY, IDENTITY AND THE NATURE OF (INTER)TEXT ‘Uncomfortably Like Magic’: 134 Self as (Inter)Text in The Ivy Tree ‘The Times Were Out of Joint’: 145 History and (Inter)Text in Wildfire at Midnight ‘Distance Lends Enchantment’: 154 Intoxicating Stories in The Gabriel Hounds ‘Frail Parchment Ghosts’: 163 The Uncanny Text in Touch Not the Cat ‘Hedging Yourself Up With Legends’: 173 The Power of Text CONCLUSION 175 WORKS CITED 183 vii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1 Cover Art for Cecelia Ahern, P. S. I Love You (London: HarperCollins, 2007); Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Headline Review, 2006); Katie Fforde, A Vintage Wedding (London: Century, 2015). viii INTRODUCTION ‘It is time, I think, to make a confession. Though I was a student of literature [...] I wrote science fiction’.1 Mary Stewart did not write science fiction, but this ‘confession’ from Rose Fenemore, protagonist of her penultimate romantic thriller Stormy Petrel (1991), speaks to a preoccupation with the notion of literary value that appears throughout her work. Rose is a lecturer in English Literature at Cambridge University, and ‘a serious poet who [has] gained some small recognition’ (33). That Rose understands these identities to be at odds with her career as an author of genre fiction is clear from how she keeps her writing of science fiction secret – she publishes her novels under a pseudonym, choosing to associate her real name only with her less commercially successful poetry – and in her fear of being ‘embarrass[ed]’ when the subject of science fiction arises in conversation with her students (33; 102). Rose’s attitude is, I argue, the result of her awareness of the supposed incompatibility between highbrow literature – which as a Cambridge don and poet is where her allegiances would generally be expected to lie – and popular fiction. She fears that her writing of popular science fiction will undermine her position within the academy. Yet Rose gleans the same satisfaction from and exerts the same effort in producing both her poetry and her science fiction. As the novel progresses, she finds herself tentatively defending the genre against a student who ‘contemptuously’ dismisses it as ‘fairy tales’: Rose argues that ‘all the stories that feed the modern hunger for the super-natural – they do tend to be more or less moral’ (102-3). By the novel’s close, her star student – Megan Lloyd – enthusiastically deems the revelation of her tutor’s alter-ego as ‘lit. and met. [literally and metaphorically] fantastic’ (184). In Stormy Petrel, then, the boundaries between the highbrow and the popular are shown to be less than clear-cut. The troubling of these boundaries is characteristic of Stewart’s recurring preoccupation with literary hierarchies, categories, and definitions, and it is an investigation of this preoccupation which constitutes the project of this thesis. With a focus on her romantic thrillers published between the 1950s and the 1970s, I argue that Stewart’s work expresses a metafictively self-conscious interest in exploring wider questions concerning the nature and purpose of text, and how it is categorised and defined. 1 Mary Stewart, Stormy Petrel (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), p.33. All subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text. 1 ‘The Mother of Twentieth-Century Romantic Suspense’: Mary Stewart’s ‘Romantic Thrillers’ Born in Sunderland in 1916, Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow grew up in Co. Durham where her father, Frederick Rainbow, served as an Anglican minister. Her mother was Mary Edith (née Matthews), from New Zealand. Stewart began writing and illustrating stories at an early age, but at school her intelligence resulted in bullying. The experience stayed with her – ‘I still have no self-confidence’, she said – and also made its way into her fiction; the protagonist of Thornyhold (1988), Geillis ‘Gilly’ Ramsey, remembers her school days as ‘a hell of teasing and torture’.2 Having turned down places, for financial reasons, at both Oxford and Cambridge, Stewart enrolled at Durham University to read English and gained a B.A.