Steel City Readers makes available, and interprets in detail, a large body of new evidence about past cultures and communities of reading. Its distinctive method is to listen to readers' own voices, rather than theorising about them as an undifferentiated group. Its cogent and engaging structure traces reading journeys from childhood into education and adulthood, and attends to settings from home to school to library. It has a distinctive focus on reading for pleasure and its framework of argument situates that type of reading in relation to dimensions of gender and class. It is grounded in place, and particularly in the context of a specific industrial city: Sheffield. The men and women featured in the book, coming to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s, rarely regarded reading as a means of self-improvement. It was more usually a compulsive and intensely pleasurable private activity.
This book provides a lot of background about readers who have not previously been studied and where/how/why they obtained their reading material, and is therefore valuable in understanding the context/reception of romances published in this period. Because of this focus on the experiences of readers, there isn't a great deal specifically about romance (or, in fact, about other genres or specific texts), but I've gathered what I could find about romance below:
At 14 Judith went on to the adult library, where she worked her way down whole shelves full of the historical novels of Jeffrey Farnol and Georgette Heyer. (54)
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Judging by the catalogue of books for sale [of books withdrawn from the Boots lending library] in 1939 the majority of the fiction stock was made up of romances and detective novels, which would have pleased Elsie Brownlee. 1939 was the year she started uncongenial office work and found solace in romantic fiction. In Boots bargain basement she found tired copies of novels by those queens of romance, Mary Burchell, Ruby M. Ayres, Ethel M. Dell and Betty Trask, and hundreds of books with the word ‘honeymoon’, ‘kiss’ or ‘love’ in their titles by authors whose identity may be beyond recall. (107)
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Elsie Brownlee not only bought her romances from the Boots bargain basement but is unusual among our readers in that she used a tuppenny library well into the 1960s while most people’s memories focus on the 1930s to mid-1950s. She is also unusual in having used it on her own behalf and not for a parent. In the 1950s she worked in a bank by day and as an auxiliary nurse in the evening. After a hysterectomy, with weakened health and soon to be the sole carer for her chronically ill mother, she had to give up her dearly prized second job in the local hospital. She had only discovered her vocation to be a nurse in her thirties, having been pressured by her father to leave school early and become an office worker. She remembers her bitter sense of loss as she listened to the helicopters flying over her house taking patients to the spinal unit attached to the hospital: ‘Withdrawal symptoms – “Oh, I wish as I was in there.” It was awful really.’ The Red Circle library was a comfort.
I didn’t really have a lot of time for reading but what reading I did, I found [it at] this Red Circle library at the top of Angel St. I liked to read Mills and Boon type stories which you couldn’t get out of the Central Library – their books were far too stuffy for me and so I used to go and get the books from the Red Circle library. Mary Burchell was one of them.
The plots of Burchell’s novels are conventional romance plots, but then so are the plots of the operas on which many of her novels are based. ‘Mary Burchell’ was the pen name of Ida Cook from Sunderland, whose passion for opera was financed by her 110 novels published by Mills and Boon. In the late 1930s she and her sister used their opera trips to Germany to smuggle 29 Jews to safety. The plots of the novels may be less astonishing than Ida Cook’s own life but they are interesting, often addressing the dilemmas faced by female musicians or career women whose vocations conflict with their romantic desires. Elsie may well have been directed to Burchell’s novels by the librarian at the Red Circle who offered a personal service comparable to that received by ‘On Demand’ subscribers in a Boots library. (110-111)
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Barbara Green was deeply disappointed at not being able to take the place she had gained at grammar school in 1955. She went on to do an English degree in 1992. Her mother’s determined and enthusiastic enjoyment of romantic novels had established the reading habit far more powerfully than any English lessons at Burngreave Secondary Modern. (148)
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In addition to novels which had been made into film adaptations, Mary’s friends enjoyed more recent authors such as the mystery writers Bruce Graeme and Agatha Christie and the thriller writer Sydney Horler. The popular novels read by the 23 girls were the most contemporary of the titles mentioned: modern but in the traditional romance genre. Staple authors of Mills and Boon such as Denise Robins, Anne Duffield and Margaret Pedler were popular, as were the violent versions of the ‘punishing kiss’ by Ethel M. Dell. (163)
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Josie was one of the youngest of our interviewees, born in 1942. She married in the early 1960s and had four children in quick succession. The meticulous diary she has kept of her reading from 1962 to 2005 is a testament to her determination to get back to her books as soon as possible and to their importance to her. Josie commented with disapproval that during her first pregnancy, in 1964, she had read not a single book. In 1966 she got going again, reading two books a month, chiefly thrillers and historical romances. Then in 1967 she had twins: ‘I didn’t stop reading. I thought, “they’re not doing that to me again”’, and from then on she continued her gallop through romantic and historical novels, in particular the novels of Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy. (193)
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Boots being out of the financial reach of most, the municipal libraries would have been the most likely source of contemporary literary works with a high critical reputation, but in the 1930s and 1940s librarians were not trained to act as literary mentors, and Chief Librarian Lamb, of course, hoped that readers would find their own ways of making reading choices. Custodians of cheap commercial libraries, on the other hand, made a point of responding to and guiding their customers’ tastes. In a 1931 Mills and Boon romance by the bestselling Sophie Cole, much is made of the quicksilver way in which the well-educated lover of the heroine shifts the attention of the varied clientele of her tuppenny library from popular to more literary fiction or vice versa. By extending the customers’ tastes he increases the profits of his beloved. (215)
Here's the abstract:
This book provides a lot of background about readers who have not previously been studied and where/how/why they obtained their reading material, and is therefore valuable in understanding the context/reception of romances published in this period. Because of this focus on the experiences of readers, there isn't a great deal specifically about romance (or, in fact, about other genres or specific texts), but I've gathered what I could find about romance below:
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