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.