‘The book held me like a visit from an amusing, valued friend: the Inter-War Middlebrow novels of E. M. Delafield and E. H. Young

This thesis explores the perceived identification between reader and central character in a selection of E. M. Delafield’s and E. H. Young’s inter-war novels. These domestic middlebrow novels cleverly seduce the reader into believing that the world they are presented with in the book is real life. The authors mirrored their readers in the creation of their characters and so the reader is absorbed in an expertly contained and controlled aspirational fantasy. The authors encourage their reader’s identification with the characters in a variety of means which are examined through close textual analysis. A key source of information in this study comes from contemporary criticism, reviews and debate. This thesis returns to the material history of the middlebrow, examining archival magazines and journals as well as the literary criticism from the period