Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain

233 Pages·2018·3.315 MB·English

by  Lisa Stead

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‘Lisa Stead’s methodologically sophisticated and impeccably researched
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study of women and cinema culture between the wars brings under
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the spotlight a transformative moment when popular media,modernity,
modernism and femininity came together in shaping unprecedented new
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ways of being a woman.’
O
AnnetteKuhn,QueenMaryUniversityofLondon
Off to the Pictures offers a rich new exploration of gendered cultures of T
cinema between the wars,and their complex intersections with literary
H
media. Examining a range of writings,from newspapers and magazines
to middlebrow and modernist fictions,Lisa Stead argues that the diverse E
storytelling media that women constructed around filmgoing came to
constitute a gendered intermedial movie culture at this time. Looking at P
the writings of figures such asWinifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Elizabeth
I
Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elinor Glyn, C. A.Lejeune and Iris Barry, the book
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draws upon new archival research and close textual readings to
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interrogate a literary preoccupation with the figure of the female
cinemagoer. U
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A series of case studies reveal that film and literary media created new
identities for women as both the creators and consumers of interwar E
movie culture, intervening in the way women saw and thought about
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themselves,and how they navigated the everyday experiences of
modernity. Off to the Pictures thus presents a bold new view of interwar
movie culture,read through the creative reflections of the women who
experienced it.
L
I
Lisa Stead is a Lecturer in Film Studies in the School ofArt,Media and
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O F F T O T H E
American Studies at the University of EastAnglia. She is the co-editor of
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The Boundaries of the LiteraryArchive:Reclamation and Representation (2013).
Her essays on fandom,archives and women’s cinema have appeared in S
P I C T U R E S
Women’s History Review andTransformativeWorks and Cultures,among other T
publications. E
A
D
CINEMA-GOING , WOMEN’S
Coverimage:Cinemapublicityprogramme:RegentCinema,Brighton,weekcommencing28October
WRITING AND MOVIE CULTURE
1923/Ifwintercomes.CourtesyofTheBillDouglasCinemaMuseum,UniversityofExeter.
Coverdesign: AndrewMcColm IN INTERWAR BRITAIN
L I S A S T E A D
ISBN978-0-7486-9488-4
edinburghuniversitypress.com
Off to the Pictures

Off to the Pictures
Cinema-going, Women’s Writing and
Movie Culture in Interwar Britain
Lisa Stead
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
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information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Lisa Stead, 2016
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
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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).
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 217
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 Harlow 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
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.
For CRS
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