Literary celebrity, in this account, is part of the “hubbub” of everyday life, yet it also gives access to a “magical world.” The celebrity author is magnified, elevated above ordinary mortals. At the same time, she is incorporated into the bewildering modern city, and cannot take refuge from the public, even in her bedroom. Simply by her known presence, she contributes to the chaos, but it is her name and not herself which circulates in the street. Shouted out and repeated, the name becomes part of the “noise and confusion”; its meaning and value are renegotiated as it is translated...

The Dorothy Parker persona has come down to us not only through her own writing but via biography, scholarship, film, memoir, and popular nostalgia for the 1920s. The creation of Dorothy Parker as celebrity was begun through her own cultivation of an identifiable style, by means of her journalism and her social image, especially her highly publicized association with the Algonquin Round Table. But her writing soon became subordinated to the mythologized image of the viciously witty “Mrs. Parker,” and eventually the Parker legend exceeded her control and eclipsed her actual literary achievements.

Parker’s work has been further marginalized by...

Anita Loos’s writing, like Dorothy Parker’s, was shaped by the discourses of sophistication and cosmopolitanism, which were mediated by magazines such asVanity Fair,The New Yorker,Harper’s Bazar,¹ andThe Smart Set. Her best-selling novelGentlemen Prefer Blondes(1925) was initially serialized inHarper’s Bazar; when it appeared in volume form, its astonishing sales made Loos a millionaire and a celebrity. Also a successful and well-connected screenwriter, she had an intimate knowledge of Hollywood as well as the literary high society of New York. She was introduced to the Algonquin Round Table, and remarked in her autobiography: “I dismissed...

It is something of a surprise to find Anita Loos describing herself as starstruck: after all, from the beginning of her career, she had associated with a whole procession of celebrities, from D. W. Griffith to Marion Davies, Margot Asquith to Scott Fitzgerald. The extent of Mae West’s fame in 1936 can certainly be measured by Loos’s unwonted excitement. Loos, though, deliberately emphasizes her inflated expectations in order to heighten the contrast between the imagined West and the woman she actually saw. The “legend” of Mae West—fueled by rumors of the “fabled” apartment, the music lessons she was “said...

Lucy Maud Montgomery is the only author considered in this study who can be compared to Mae West in terms of her impact on popular culture. Her first novel,Anne of Green Gables(1908), became an international best seller and spawned seven sequels, numerous screen adaptations, a series of spin-off products, and an entire tourist industry in Prince Edward Island. In their book on Canadian popular culture,Mondo Canuck, journalists Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond identifyAnne of Green Gablesas “the most widely read Canadian book ever written” (13). By the 1910s and through the interwar years, Montgomery was...

Among the novels discussed in this study,Anne of Green GablesandThe Constant Nymph(1924) are the most romantic in their vision. Kennedy, like Montgomery, places much emphasis on imagination and creativity, imbues her texts with literary allusiveness (particularly in reference to Shakespeare), and creates a pastoral idyll. But the romantic qualities are not straightforward. Both authors undercut the pastoral fantasy, and also refuse “romantic” endings in the love-story sense. InAnne of Green Gablesand also inEmily of New Moon, Montgomery ensures that her teenage heroines’ relationships with the leading males remain on the level of friendship....

The narrative modes ofCold Comfort FarmandThe Constant Nymphcontrast strikingly, yet the two books have important similarities. Like Margaret Kennedy’s Florence, Stella Gibbons’s protagonist, Flora, is a confident but somewhat officious young woman, committed to ideals of civilization, good manners, pleasant domestic surroundings, and the moral benefits of culture. Both narratives are structured by the protagonist’s journey away from a center of civilization (Cambridge or London) and into an unknown rural environment, where she encounters a large, genealogically complex, and entirely uncivilized family who are her cousins. InThe Constant Nymph, Florence inhabits a romance narrative, with...

In February 1931, E. M. Delafield published the first installment of a series called “Women in Fiction” inTime and Tide. It identified the types of women likely to feature in “the dialect novel”:

The malignant grandmother [. . .] dominates the book, and all the people in it, and the destinies of every one of them, and is almost always the victim of a disease, or at least a disability, that keeps her in bed, or anyway in a chair. Briefly, the general rule is that her sons should be weaklings and degenerates and her daughters neurotic victims of...

In 2002 and 2004, the BBC seriesBefore the Bookerasked which novels would have won the Booker prize if it had existed before 1969. Each program focused on one particular year, ranging from 1818 to 1966, identifying four contenders for each supposed prize. American authors were permitted, although they would not have been eligible for the real Booker prize. The books selected for 1925 were Kafka’sThe Trial, Woolf’sMrs. Dalloway, Fitzgerald’sThe Great Gatsby, and Loos’sGentlemen Prefer Blondes. For 1932, they were Huxley’sBrave New World, Waugh’sBlack Mischief, Faulkner’sLight in August, and Gibbons’sCold Comfort...