The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment

Mary Grover was brought up for many years outside Britain. She studied English at Cambridge University, focusing on Medieval Literature. Having taught in a wide range of educational institutions in Britain, she is now an Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University where her curiosity about middlebrow taste is not held against her. She is a founder of the transatlantic Middlebrow Research Network and has organized conferences in Britain on middlebrow taste. In a forthcoming collection of essays on the expatriate writer Rumer Godden she discusses the ways in which cultural hierarchies in Britain were modeled in interwar Bengal during the decline of the British Empire. This book aims to place the fears of those readers and authors anathematized as "middlebrow" in the domain of the academy, in the hope that awareness of the way cultural hierarchies are underpinned by anxieties about class, gender, and cultural confidence will inform future research into the neglected area of middlebrow taste. She is now helping to establish an archive entitled "Reading and Reception, 1880-1940" at Sheffield Hallam and is responsible for reviewing work on British fiction 1930-45 for The Year's Work in English Studies.