ABSTRACT
With the appearance of William in 1925, the first of her novels to focus on middle-class domesticity, Young was warmly received on both sides of the Atlantic.2 An American reviewer, Mary Ross, noted that after William sold out in the US, ‘its reputation was spread almost solely by word of mouth … until there was an expectant group on the lookout for the next work of this almost anonymous author’ (New York Herald Tribune, 28 September 1930: 6). Yet Woolf ’s tempered response highlights the difficulty of positioning novelists like Young in terms of readership and the canon and resonates with our own queries. What significance for the history of women’s writing and reading can we draw from ‘this very good novelist’, whose works are now difficult to obtain but whose novels, Celia and Chatterton Square, delighted undergraduate and graduate students alike in recent classes we have taught? Why, as Woolf wondered, was Young not more famous than Hugh Walpole and H.G. Wells, famously middlebrow novelists? 3 In fact, as the following discussion will show, Young was lauded in her time; however, together with other practitioners of the domestic novel genre, she was
affected by changes in the marketing of books and taste, institutional forces which form and legitimize the canon and presuppositions which attempt to pigeonhole books and readers as either popular, middlebrow, or highbrow.4 Why is her presence more shadowy than Elizabeth Bowen’s, Rosamond Lehmann’s, or Vita Sackville-West’s? Did Young’s insistence on privacy and her refusal to engage with the public sphere and literary London hamper recognition of her talents?
