Berta Ruck’s interwar romance novels address contemporary anxieties about the changing role of women in Britain after 1918. Ruck’s novels focus both on the modern woman in contrast to the Victorian woman, and the extent to which modernity and the new freedoms wrought by the First World War emancipated women from the traditionalisms of the pre-war period. Over the course of the interwar period, however, Ruck began to question whether young women were embracing the full potential of their new freedoms or if they were trading one kind of conformity for another. Ruck challenges young women to dispense with unnecessary labels – mods versus the conventional woman – that prevent women from understanding and embracing their true selves. Ruck delays the expected happy ending until the protagonists reject the performative modernity of societal expectations – a journey centered around new employment and courtship rituals that came to define the modern woman – and arrive at a true understanding of self, accomplished by embracing sincerity and emotional honesty.
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As in Twelfth Night, [in Ruck'sSir or Madam(1923)] the gender reveal does not completely reverse the narrative. Wellalone fell in love with a boy and Guelda admits that she is neither fully a boy nor fully a girl. Ruck embraces the complexities of the modern woman and man at the same time that she challenges traditional gender norms that are incompatible with Guelda’s fragmented self-consciousness. The modern man rejects old masculine values, and the masculinized woman is eroticized by her gender fluidity. (10)
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