| dc.description.abstract | This thesis analyses the defence of spinsterhood in Winifred Holtby’s novel South Riding: An
English Landscape (1936) in connection to its criticism of interwar popular romance fiction
that prioritised marriage for women. During the 1930s, the reassertion of traditional gender
roles, the shifting attention of feminism away from spinsterhood and the emergence of new
theories within psychology and sexology on the negative psychological influence of
spinsterhood complicated the spinster’s position within society. As a result, these women
were stereotypically presented as anomalous, mentally thwarted and marginal figures within
literature. Particularly, popular romance fiction that emerged during the 1930s overtly focused
on marriage for women and subsequently perpetuated the negative discourse around spinsters.
Despite the significant critical engagement with elements of romance in South Riding, the
influence of the popular romance genre has been largely neglected in previous research on the
novel. Until now, literary scholars have mainly placed Holtby within the context of
middlebrow fiction and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), ignoring her novel’s immediate
intertextual and social relationship with the burgeoning popular romance novel of the 1930s
and its influence, of which Holtby herself was highly aware. This thesis therefore analyses
Holtby’s engagement with popular romance fiction in South Riding and argues that as a
feminist, writer and reformer Holtby challenges the stereotypical portrayal of spinsterhood in
interwar literature by subverting its conventions. In this manner, Holtby foregrounds that
“[o]ur life stories are not wholly love stories”, undermining the importance of the popular
romance narrative that prioritises marriage and pathologizes spinsters. | |
