A middlebrow tidbit

Last week, trying to find more information about a writer (I can’t even remember which one now), a routine Amazon search produced The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume 4: 1900-1950 as a result.  Seeing as it was published in 1972 and is wildly outdated for contemporary researchers, it was a bargain at $4.00 including shipping.  I figured there was a chance it would be useless as far as information about lesser-known women writers, but it might still be of some historical interest, and at that price it was hard to resist.  (At this rate, I’ll soon have my very own reference library.)

The book arrived yesterday, and I thought I’d share some of its more interesting points here.

First, some background.  The book basically is, as its title says, a bibliography.  Meaning it primarily lists works by and about British writers who were prominent between 1900 and 1950.  There are no details about the works, and no biographical information—just works and dates.  But this allows the book to condense into a relatively small package a plethora of information on what was, in effect, the state of the British canon circa 1972.  It’s not a book I’ll be likely to pour over for weeks on end, but it is an interesting snapshot of what writers from the period were considered significant four decades ago.

It’s certainly unsurprising that the book disproportionately favors male writers.  Roughly 80% of the writers shown under “The Novel” are men.  But 20% women is perhaps a pretty good average for 1972 (and some more recent scholars barely manage even that).  What’s more, among the writers included are, interestingly, several that I have raved about on this blog, who in 2013 are shrouded in obscurity but in 1972 were apparently still relatively known and recognized—most notably, Edith Olivier and Norah Hoult.

Reassuringly for me, if I’m not mistaken, all of the women included in this section are either already on my Overwhelming List or are excluded only because I’ve kept my list limited to writers from the British Isles (though I have occasional pangs when I think of excluding the likes of Katherine Mansfield and Christina Stead).  Though at least one, Nancy Brysson Morrison, only squeaked in with my last update!

It’s still quite easy to point out writers I think should have been included. While many of the writers on my Overwhelming List were probably pretty obscure right from the start, others had certainly had significant success and acclaim prior to 1950.  Ann Bridge, Anna Buchan, Monica Dickens, Rachel Ferguson, Molly Keane, Marghanita Laski, F. M. Mayor, D. E. Stevenson, and Elizabeth Taylor came to mind fairly quickly.  But I actually only found a handful whose absence from the list truly shocked me—no Vera Brittain or Winifred Holtby?  No Cicely Hamilton?  What about Georgette Heyer?

(One oddity I noticed: If the time frame is 1900-1950, why would the editors have included Barbara Pym, whose first novel appeared in 1950 [and who, in 1972, had been “unpublishable” for over a decade and whose triumphant return was still several years away], but excluded Elizabeth Taylor, whose debut novel appeared in 1945 and had been steadily publishing ever since?  Ah, the mysteries of the academic selection process!)

Also interesting to me was the number of male writers included whom I’d never heard of.  Admittedly, I don’t read a lot of male writers these days, but I spent a fair number of years early in my literary studies reading almost entirely canonical (i.e. mostly male) writers, so I was surprised to be unfamiliar with fully 50% of the male writers mentioned.  I bet most of you will find names you’ve never heard before too.  When was the last time you picked up a tome by Roy Broadbent Fuller or William Pett Ridge?  And how much space is reserved on your bookcases for the complete works of Ralph Hale Mottram or Gerald Bullett?  The ebb and flow of the canonical tide is always fascinating and often surprising.

As would be expected, a lot more women appeared in the book’s separate section for children’s fiction, and quite a few more of the writers on my list appear there—though the adult novels many of them also wrote are largely ignored.  But this section contains a LOT of names I’ve never come across before, and some of those probably belong on my list.  Always more research to be done!

At any rate, for anyone else who might enjoy lists as much as I do, below are the lists:

1. of women novelists;
2. of male novelists;
3. of additional women listed under children’s fiction; and
4. of women listed in the book’s smaller drama section. 

(The asterisks in the lists of novelists indicate writers who are given the prestige of their very own separate section at the beginning of the list—one woman [three guineas—um, I mean three guesses—which one...] and seven men achieved this honor.)

WOMEN NOVELISTS

*Virginia Woolf

Enid Bagnold

Theodora Benson

Stella Benson

Phyllis Bentley

Phyllis Bottome

Elizabeth Bowen

Marjorie Bowen

Mary Butts

Catherine Carswell

Agatha Christie

Ivy Compton-Burnett

Clemence Dane

E. M. Delafield

Maud Diver

Daphne du Maurier

Margiad Evans

Ellen Fowler

Elinor Glyn

Rumer Godden

Radclyffe Hall

Constance Holme

Norah Hoult

Violet Hunt

Margaret Irwin

Storm Jameson

F. Tennyson Jesse

Pamela Hansford Johnson

Sheila Kaye-Smith

Margaret Kennedy

Rosamond Lehmann

Ada Leverson

Marie Belloc Lowndes

Rose Macaulay

Olivia Manning

Katherine Mansfield

Ethel Colburn Mayne

Viola Meynell

Naomi Mitchison

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Agnes Brysson Morrison

Willa Muir

Kate O’Brien

Edith Olivier

Barbara Pym

Jean Rhys

Dorothy Richardson

Naomi Royde-Smith

Vita Sackville-West

Dorothy Sayers

Beatrice Seymour

Ethel Sidgwick

May Sinclair

Somerville & Ross

Christina Stead

G. B. Stern

Angela Thirkell

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Mary Webb

Rebecca West

Romer Wilson

E. H. Young

MALE NOVELISTS

*Joseph Conrad

*H. G. Wells

*Arnold Bennett

*E. M. Forster

*James Joyce

*D. H. Lawrence

*Graham Greene

J. R. Ackerley

Richard Aldington

Walter Ernest Allen

Michael Arlen

Henry Christopher Bailey

Nigel Balchin

Maurice Baring

Joseph Alexander Baron

H. E. Bates

Ralph Bates

Thomas Owen Beachcroft

Samuel Beckett

Max Beerbohm

Adrian Bell

Neil Bell (Stephen Southwald)

Hilaire Belloc

E. C. Bentley

John Davys Beresford

Anthony Berkeley (aka Frances Iles)

George Birmingham

Algernon Blackwood

George Blake

David Bone

Ernest Bramah

John Brophy

John Buchan

Gerald Bullett

Thomas Burke

Arthur Calder-Marshall

Gilbert Cannan

Joyce Cary

G. K. Chesterton

Erskine Childers

Richard Thomas Church

John Collier

Alexander Comfort

A. E. Coppard

Rhys Davies

George Warwick Deeping

Walter de la Mare

William Frend de Morgan

Nigel Dennis

Hugh de Selincourt

Norman Douglas

Lawrence Durrell

Caradoc Evans

Ronald Firbank

Ford Madox Ford

C. S. Forester

Gilbert Frankau

Ronald Fraser

Roy Broadbent Fuller

John Galsworthy

David Garnett

W. L. George

William Gerhardie

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Philip Hamilton Gibbs

Louis Golding

R. B. Cunninghame Graham

Kenneth Grahame

Robert Graves

Frederick Lawrence Green

Henry Green

Neil Gunn

Patrick Hamilton

John Hampson

James Hanley

L. P. Hartley

Ian Hay

Alan Patrick Herbert

Maurice Hewlett

Robert Hichens

James Hilton

Geoffrey Edward West Household

Stephen Hudson

Richard Hughes

A. S. M. Hutchinson

Ray Coryton Hutchinson

Aldous Huxley

Michael Innes

Christopher Isherwood

William Wymark Jacobs

M. R. James

David Michael Jones

Hugh Kingsmill

C. H. B. Kitchen

Arthur Koestler

Alun Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis

Clive Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

David Lindsay

Jack Lindsay

Eric Linklater

Richard Llewellyn

William John Locke

Malcolm Lowry

Percy Lubbock

Archibald Gordon MacDonell (aka Neil Gordon)

William Morley Punshon McFee

Arthur Llewelyn Jones Machen

Denis Mackail

Stephen McKenna

Compton Mackenzie

Frederic Manning

Louis Marlow

John Masefield

A. E. W. Mason

W. Somerset Maugham

William Babington Maxwell

Richard Barham Middleton

A. A. Milne

Nicholas Monsarrat

C. E. Montague

Charles Morgan

Ralph Hale Mottram

Edwin Muir

L. H. Myers

Percy Howard Newby

Beverley Nichols

William Edward Norris

Flann O’Brien

Frank O’Connor

Sean O’Faolain

Liam O’Flaherty

Richard Oke

Seumas O’Kelly

Oliver Onions

George Orwell

John Oxenham

Barry Pain

Mervyn Peake

Eden Phillpotts

William Plomer

Anthony Powell

John Cowper Powys

Llewelyn Powys

T. F. Powys

J. B. Priestley

Victor Pritchett

Edwin Pugh

Arthur Ransome

Herbert Read

Forrest Reid

Stephen Reynolds

William Pett Ridge

Cecil Edric Mornington Roberts

Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo)

Edward Sackville-West

Michael Sadleir

Saki (aka H. H. Munro)

William Sansom

Sapper (aka Herman McNeile)

John Dick Scott

R. C. Sherriff

Nevil Shute

Osbert Sitwell

Sacheverell Sitwell

C. P. Snow

Robert Howard Spring

William Olaf Stapledon

James Stephens

Leonard Alfred George Strong

Frank Swinnerton

Julian Symons

Dylan Thomas

A. G. Thornton

J. R. R. Tolkien

H. M. Tomlinson

Philip Toynbee

Henry Treece

Robert Tressell

Walter James Redfurn Turner

Edward Upward

Horace Annesley Vachell

Edgar Wallace

Hugh Walpole

Rex Warner

Alex Waugh

Evelyn Waugh

Denton Welch

Anthony Panther West

T. H. White

Charles Williams

Henry Williamson

Angus Wilson

P. G. Wodehouse

Dornford Yates

Francis Brett Young

CHILDREN’S FICTION (women only--and in no fathomable order I could detect)

Grace Rhys

Beatrix Potter

Angela Brazil

Rose Fyleman

Victoria Eleanor Louise Doorly

Margery Williams (aka Margery Bianco)

E. H. Young

Marion St. John Webb

Daisy Ashford

Eleanor Farjeon

Virginia Woolf (mentioned because of a piece called “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble” ???)

Kitty Barne

Constance Heward

Alison Uttley

Margaret Batchelor

Grace James

Elsie Oxenham

Christine Chaundler

Marjorie Bowen

Enid Bagnold

Helen Waddell

Margaret Baker

Richmal Crompton

Dorita Fairlie Bruce

Dorothy Hann

Gwynedd Rae

Vera Charlesworth Barclay

Cicely Englefield

Cynthia Mary Harnett

Amabel Williams-Ellis

Cicely Mary Barker

Elinor Brent-Dyer

Arnrid Johnston

Ruth Manning-Sanders

Alice Hall

Elsie Smeaton Munro

Rhoda Dolore le Poer Power

Barbara Euphan Todd

Esther Boumphrey

Joyce Lankester Brisley

Eleanor Graham

Hilda Lewis

Naomi Mitchison

Carola Oman

Noel Streatfeild

Joanna Cannan

Kathleen Hale

Patricia Nora Lynch

Enid Blyton

Mary Evelyn Atkinson

Elizabeth Goudge

Claire Veronica Hope Leighton

Josephine Elder

Golden Gorse (aka Mrs. M. A. Wace)

Virginia Pye

Stella Gibbons

Enid Marx

Margot Mary Pardoe

Elfrida Vipont

Bettina (aka Bettina Ehrlich)

Mary Norton

Mary Adshead (later Bone)

Magdalen King-Hall

Alice Margaret Coats

Mary Kathleen Harris

Mary Emett

Dorothy Ann Lovell

Katharine Tozer

Mary Irene Cathcart Borer

P. L. Travers

Rumer Godden

Joan Marshall Grant

Ruth Gallard Ainsworth

Joan Kiddell-Monroe

Monica Redlich

Diana Ross (aka Diana Denney)

Mary Treadgold

Margaret Melville Balfour

Helen and Margaret Binyan

Cicely Fox-Smith

Eve Garnett

Theodosia Frances Wynne Hickey

Elizabeth Kyle (aka Agnes Mary Robertson Dunlop)

Lorna Lewis

Ann Scot Moncrieff

Violet Needham

Mimpsy Rhys

Catherine Scales

Violet Hilda Drummond

Noel Langley

Ursula Moray Williams

Monica Edwards

Mabel Esther Allan

Clare Collas

Kathleen Fidler

Olive Dehn

Antonia Forest

Joan Selby Lowndes

Antonia Florence Ridge

Margaret Joyce Baker

Yvonne Moyra Graham Charlton

Cam (aka Barbara Mary Campbell)

Audrey Clark

Dorothy Craigie

Hilary Stebbing

Katharine Hull

Pamela Brown

Christine Pullein-Thompson

DRAMA (women only)

Enid Bagnold

Elizabeth Baker

Bridget Boland

Agatha Christie

Clemence Dane

Gordon Daviot (aka Josephine Tey)

Teresa Deevy

Gertrude Eleanor Jennings

Margaret Kennedy

Esther McCracken

Anne Barbara Ridler

Dorothy Sayers

Dodie Smith

Githa Katherine Sowerby

Lesley Storm

Joan Temple (who apparently also wrote novels?)