ABSTRACT
Elizabeth von Arnim wrote Anna Leach in The New York Times Book Review in response to Elizabeth von Arnim's novel, Christine. Leach's comments raise a number of pertinent questions about the critical reception of literary texts and, as Leach implies, these are especially relevant to von Arnim's writing. Von Arnim's writing has not always attracted such sporadic attention, however, even if a literary career as long as hers allows time for the reputation of the work to wax and wane. In the United States, where von Arnim's work was well received by the reading public, the ideas are somewhat different. Even so, creating a literary fashion and courting a general readership are usually insufficient in helping to develop a secure literary reputation and, as they know, paradoxically, popular acceptance of this sort can actually be a hindrance to critical approval. Rubin's book investigates the creation of middlebrow culture in America of which Greenberg's rhetoric was a part.
