Reviews for Edwardian Poetry

The average rating for Edwardian Poetry based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-25 00:00:00 HYKEEM JOHNSON I enjoyed this a lot. Very engaging and insightful if you've an interest in the topic, which I assuredly do. I was glad that many books I know well were discussed (in varying degrees of detail), including The Brontës Went to Woolworths, Guard Your Daughters, Diary of a Provincial Lady, Gaudy Night, and Love in a Cold Climate. Even when I hadn't read a particular book (ie The Constant Nymph, which I'm now glad to have avoided thus far, or works by those indistinguishable to me mid 20th century Elizabeths, Bowen and Taylor), the discussion was interesting because Humble relates the books to the social trends of those decades. The chapter on "the Eccentric Family" which looks at this curious feature which so many middlebrow novels of the era have in common, examined through the lenses of both Little Women and the Brontë sisters, hit a particularly sweet spot for me. This is a work I'll gladly keep on my shelves and pull out to read bits of whenever I read or reread one of the relevant books.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-20 00:00:00 Matthew McQuay Several novels from my mother's shelves are discussed in this interesting study. I grew up reading Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and Dorothy Sayers but avoided Angela Thirkell even though we had four of her titles, and some of the pleasures of that reading are ones Nicola Humble both describes and evokes through frequent quotation. Humble's distinctions between middlebrow and modernist, as well as her consideration of a variety of genres, are useful. Instead of reevaluating authors like Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth Bowen as modernist, Humble wishes to appreciate them as middlebrow, both guiding and challenging the assumptions of women reading from the 1920s to the 1950s. But I'm still trying to figure out why Rumer Godden is not mentioned here at all, when both A Fugue in Time and China Court exhibit many of the features Humble identifies as characteristic of the feminine middlebrow novel.