Woman's Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918-1958: Making Homemakers

Here are a couple of descriptions of the relevant elements of the book, from the Introduction:

Crucial to positioning Woman's Weekly within the field of literature are the magazine's engagements with the romance genre, to which, since they take place within its subject matter, structure, and shaping of readers' interactions with single and multiple issues, this book returns frequently.43 [Footnote 43 says that: "Material from this section appears in the following journal article by the author: 'Romance in Woman's Weekly and Woman's Weekly as romance, 1918-1939,' Journal of European Periodical Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (2020), 80-94.] The model of romance used conforms to the entirely monogamous, heteronormative outlook assumed by the publication during the years surveyed: to classify, a narrative must focus on the developing love relationship between two main characters, conclude with the certainty that they will marry, and invite its assumedly female reader to participate vicariously in the process of their courtship by identifying with a heroine very like herself. With the exception of the Phinella The Famous Lady Detective series, discussed in Chapter 1, all of the fiction printed in the Woman's Weekly magazines sampled fulfils these genre-defining criteria, and the publication appeals explicitly to fans of romance, printing at least one serial episode and one complete story in each issue and promoting this material, in prominent headlines, on numerous front covers. (11)

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stories by popular novelists including Annie O. Tibbits, Ethel M. Dell, Ruby M. Ayres, and Barbara Cartland offer readers of the publication respite from everyday demands. While this juxtaposition of labour and leisure-related content is distinctive of Woman's Weekly throughout the years surveyed, Chapters 1 and 5 give the most sustained attention to the escapist properties of the magazine's romance fiction, demonstrating how the genre played a compensatory, palliative role during the traumatic aftermath of the First World War and offered fantasy spaces into which readers could retreat from dreary, bomb-damaged Britain during the late 1940s. (11-12)