Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain

Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain offers a rich new exploration of interwar women’s fictions and their complex intersections with cinema. Interrogating a range of writings, from newspapers and magazines to middlebrow and modernist fictions, the book takes the reader through the diverse print and storytelling media that women constructed around interwar film-going, arguing that literary forms came to constitute an intermedial gendered cinema culture at this time. Using detailed case studies, this innovative book draws upon new archival research, industrial analysis and close textual readings to consider cinema’s place in the fictions and critical writings of major literary figures such as Winifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elinor Glyn, C. A. Lejeune and Iris Barry. Through the lens of feminist film historiography, Off to the Pictures presents a bold new view of interwar cinema culture, read through the creative reflections of the women who experienced it.

Table of Contents:
IllustrationsAcknowledgementsPrefaceChapter 1: Off to the Pictures: Cinema, Fiction and Interwar CultureChapter 2: Screen Fantasies: Tie-ins and the Short StoryChapter 3: Middlebrow Modernity: Class, Cinemagoing and SelfhoodChapter 4: Wander, Watch, Repeat: Jean Rhys and CinemaChapter 5: Film Talk: C. A. Lejeune and the Female Film CriticChapter 6: Elinor Glyn: Intermedial Romance and Authorial StardomAfterwordBibliographyIndex

About the Author :
Dr Lisa Stead is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Swansea University. She is the author of Reframing Vivien Leigh: Stardom, Gender and the Archive (OUP, 2021) and Off to the Pictures: Women’s Writing, Cinemagoing, and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain (EUP 2016). She is co-editor (with Carrie Smith) of The Boundaries of the Literary archive (Routledge, 2013).

Review :
'Off to the Pictures presents an alternative way of examining the gendered uses of film and its part in determining the complex and changing roles and identities of women after the First World War. Looking at a range of women’s writings on or for the movies, Stead interrogates written representations of the figure of the female cinema-goer as original or artistic reflections of women who were themselves involved in processes of shaping their identity as cinema-goers and as women working in cinema, journalism or literature. A unique feature of this book is that it considers women both as consumers and producers of film and film culture.' 'Off to the Pictures presents an alternative way of examining the gendered uses of film and its part in determining the complex and changing roles and identities of women after the First World War. Looking at a range of women’s writings on or for the movies, Stead interrogates written representations of the figure of the female cinema-goer as original or artistic reflections of women who were themselves involved in processes of shaping their identity as cinema-goers and as women working in cinema, journalism or literature. A unique feature of this book is that it considers women both as consumers and producers of film and film culture.' In bringing together “cinema-going characters” with “creators of film fictions” across an array of genres and media, Stead’s project not only demonstrates how gender was navigated through cinema in this transformative period in the United Kingdom but also offers innovative means of interconnecting authorial and fictional identities, lived and imagined experiences, across media without collapsing them. In bringing together “cinema-going characters” with “creators of film fictions” across an array of genres and media, Stead’s project not only demonstrates how gender was navigated through cinema in this transformative period in the United Kingdom but also offers innovative means of interconnecting authorial and fictional identities, lived and imagined experiences, across media without collapsing them. Lisa Stead's methodologically sophisticated and impeccably researched study of women and cinema culture between the wars brings under the spotlight a transformative moment when popular media, modernity, modernism and femininity came together in shaping unprecedented new ways of being a woman.'