ABSTRACT
Rosamond Lehmann became to a considerable extent caught in the contemporary crossfire between mass and elite culture. The early critical works which included Lehmann among a group of authors did not define her writings by genre, or indeed, gender. Schiicking's work had been in the field of English literature, and he uses many examples from both English and European literature in the course of his discussion of the formation of aesthetic taste. Joan Shelley Rubin maintains that the most famous critique of American middlebrow culture remains Dwight Macdonald's articles, 'Masscult and Midcult', also published in the Partisan Review. The majority of investigations into the relationship between gender and reading have been written from a feminist or gay standpoint, and have been primarily concerned with reading against the grain of existing patriarchal literary standards. The genre of 'romantic', with a small 'r', novels could, one might think, justifiably be labelled 'the woman's novel'.
