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.

Anne Wetherilt’s British Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel is an outstanding contribution to studies of how the end of empire was felt, explored and critiqued by British writers at mid-century. Wetherilt examines an impressive array of aesthetic and political connections across her corpus of female writers, encompassing dialogic narrative practices, the discourse of ‘development’, Cold War conflicts, and British responses to anti-colonialism and immigration. The wide-ranging exploration of novels set across Asia, Africa and Britain brings new and necessary insights into the dynamic effects of colonialism, decolonisation and anti-colonial nationalism both in the former colonies and at the erstwhile imperial ‘centre’.

—Dr Matthew Whittle, Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature, University of Kent, 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.

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.