The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment

This book examines how the hierarchical structures of taste implied by the term middlebrow were negotiated by the best-selling novelist, Warwick Deeping (1877 - 1950). Deeping is the focus for three reasons: he was immensely popular, prolific, and his popularity was perceived by such critics as Q. D. Leavis as a threat to the "sensitive minority". His sixty-eight novels from 1903 to 1950 give the cultural historian the unusual opportunity of tracing the develpment of an author's attempts to protect both himself and his readers from a process of cultural devaluation. After 1925, the best-selling Sorrell and Son and its successors established "a" Deeping as a product about which both admirers and detractors had certain expectations. His response to these provides an exemplary site within which to examine how cultural distinctions were being negotiated and contested in Britain between the two World Wars.

The introduction traces the genealogy of Dr. Grover's theoretical approach. The theories of the Frankfurt school and of Pierre Bourdieu do not account adequately for the generation of texts in response to perceived cultural hierarchies. Deeping's texts are increasingly explicit in the ways they dramatize and address their own questionable cultural status. Grover uses this self-consciousness to test the limits of the usefulness of available theories of cultural production.

Chapter 1 historicizes the emergenceof the term middlebrow, contrasting its use on either side of the Atlantic to demonstrate class and cultural context. Chapter 2 shows how Deeping represented his own class positioning as bestselling author. Chapter 3 examines a group of novels, preceding Sorrell and Son and before the term middlebrow had currency, in which the writer is depicted as feminized and declassified. Chapter 4 concerns the reception of Sorrell and Son and Deeping's fictionalization of its reception. The final chapter deals with the animosity to which Sorrell's success exposed the culturally beleaguered Deeping