The writing of Betty Miller: 1933-1949

This thesis is the first comprehensive study of the writing of the author, journalist, reviewer and scholar Betty Miller (1910-65). As such it seeks to develop a language with which readers might think about her work. Analysing the ways in which commentators have redrawn the critical maps of the 1930s and 40s provides a crucial context for an understanding of Miller’s work as a product of its cultural inception. Exploring the dynamics of the various socio-historic and institutional forces that have come to bear on the availability and readability of women’s writing from this period, The Writing of Betty Miller looks at the recuperative practices of feminist publishing houses as well as the near annihilation of Miller’s work in the Second World War. Betty Miller’s bestselling biography of Robert Browning and her non-fiction writing for journals such as Twentieth Century and Horizon in the 1950s, begin to suggest a literary context that draws out the allusions in and influences on her fiction. The seven novels that she wrote between 1933-49, read chronologically, situate her amongst contemporaneous debates on the gendered dynamics of marriage, the politics of the Anglo-Jewish experience and the familial impact of war. They also confront literary experiments of writing timeliness, boredom and violence. Close reading interrogates her texts’ most prevalent imagery and aesthetics, asking what makes her writing particularly Millerian, whilst positioning a readership that pays attention to the thoughtful examination of the morality of everyday decision-making that underlies Miller’s work.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of East Anglia

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Fellgett, Lydia

Language dc:language

en