British Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel

This book is a transformative examination of literature and popular cultures in mid-twentieth century Britain. Containing perceptive readings of key texts from significant yet hitherto marginalised writers, Wetherilt’s work adds enormously to scholarship of the period, expanding its canon and opening new avenues of critical enquiry between authors and genres as British society grappled with the immediate aftermath of decolonisation.

—Sam Goodman, Professor of English & Communication, Bournemouth University, UK.

British Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel offers the first detailed discussion of middlebrow fiction by women writers who personally witnessed the dismantling of the British Empire, the intensification of the Cold War, and the domestic tensions following the arrival of thousands of migrants from Britain’s former colonies. Studying selected novels by Cecilie Leslie, Elspeth Huxley, Mary McMinnies, Han Suyin and Kamala Markandaya, this study demonstrates that women’s middlebrow writing reveals a much deeper engagement with the politics and economics of decolonisation than is usually ascribed to the genre. As Anne Wetherilt argues, by transcending the politics of domesticity, the female middlebrow registers a critique of both Britain’s colonial history and mainstream conceptions of decolonisation as a well-managed transition from empire to commonwealth. As such, the middlebrow novel of the immediate post-war decades takes us back to a place where the end of empire was imagined rather than denied, and the ambiguities of British colonial politics exposed, rather than repressed.

Anne Wetherilt is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University, UK. In 2024, she completed a Ph.D. in English at the Open University, funded by the Open Oxford Cambridge (OOC) Doctoral Training Partnership. She also holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for many years in public policy. Her broader interests span postcolonial and global literatures, Cold War fiction and middlebrow culture more generally. Her current research focuses on the relationship between development economics and the postcolonial novel.