ABSTRACT
As late as 1903, when planning Leonora, Arnold Bennett found that reviewers ‘were staggered by my hardihood in offering a woman of forty as a subject of serious interest to the public’ (‘Preface’ to the Old Wives’ Tale: 32); three decades later, E.M. Delafield amused the readers of Time and Tide with the domestic struggles of a middle-aged woman, who according to Mary Borden was ‘too intelligent not to rage at her niggling fate, but too sensible and too gallant to bemoan her lot’ (Preface: xi), while Jan Struther turned the middle-aged housewife into a national icon with her fortnightly articles on Mrs. Miniver printed anonymously in The Times and published as a book in 1939. By making two middle-aged homemakers the protagonists of her last two novels, Young responds to Woolf ’s initiative with the characters of Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay and to the genre made popular by Jan Struther and Delafield, as well as later twentieth-century works by Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Drabble, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Alice Thomas Ellis. By 1937, increasingly, interaction with, or viewing of, domestic objects, from beds to doll’s houses, signaled key personal or interpersonal moments in Young’s novels.
