Abstract
Dornford Yates came to prominence as a writer in the 1920s. He had gained an enthusiastic readership through short stories and serialised novels in The Windsor Magazine since 1911, and his books were published by Ward, Lock & Co. His 1920s fiction expressed profound agitation, responding to the new disruptions in society that Adrian Gregory describes as ‘some anti-Semitism and colour prejudice, anti-Irish sentiment, elements of gender backlash and class conflict, all of which were strong for a year or two after the war’.1 Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas observe that ‘the decline of the landed classes’ and the ‘redefinition of gender relations’ were key indicators of social change after the war.2 These were at the foreground of Yates’s stories.
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Notes
Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2011), 1–38, 2.
Jill Greenfield, Sean O’Connell and Chris Reid, ‘Gender, consumer culture, and the middle-class male, 1918–39’, in Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (eds) Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 183–97, 184.
Len Platt, ‘Aristocratic comedy and intellectual satire’, in Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej Gasiorek (eds) The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 433–47.
Winifred Holtby, Letters to a Friend (1937) (Adelaide: Michael Walmer, 2014), 110.
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures England1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 479.
P N Furbank, ‘The twentieth-century best-seller’, in Boris Ford (ed.) The Modern Age (London: Penguin, 1961), 429–41, 435.
Dornford Yates, ‘Spring’ (1923), in And Five Were Foolish (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1924), 99–126, 100.
Dornford Yates, ‘Oliver’ (1924), in As Other Men Are (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1925), 105–29, 119, 121.
Dornford Yates, ‘What’s in a Name’, in The Courts of Idleness (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1920), 9–29, 10.
Betty D Vernon, Ellen Wilkinson (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 4.
Dornford Yates, ‘Ann’, in And Five Were Foolish (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1924), 211–50, 211–12.
Dornford Yates, Blind Corner (1927) (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1957), 25–6.
John Stevenson and Chris Cook, Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics 1929–39 (2nd edn, 1994, Longman), 29.
Dornford Yates, ‘How Adèle Feste arrived, and Mr Dunkelsbaum supped with the Devil’ (1920), in Berry & Co (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1921), 219–49, 245.
Dornford Yates, ‘Susan’ (1924), in And Five Were Foolish (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1924), 281–311, 298.
John Buchan, Mr Standfast (1919) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 216.
Jane Marcus, ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the body in/at war’, in Helen Margaret Cooper, Adrienne Munich and Susan Merrill Squier (eds) Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 124–67.
Dornford Yates, ‘Jeremy’, in As Other Men Are (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1924), 11–39, 20–1.
Dornford Yates, ‘Peregrine’, in As Other Men Are (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1924), 261–84, 265.
Dornford Yates, ‘Sarah’ (1922), in And Five Were Foolish (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1924), 11–38, 20.
Dornford Yates, ‘Force Majeure’, in Maiden Stakes (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1928), 131–60, 145.
Dornford Yates, Perishable Goods (1928) (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1957), 19.
Dornford Yates, ‘St Jeames’ (1927), in Maiden Stakes (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1928), 41–71, 57.
Dornford Yates, ‘For Better or for Worse’ (1919), in The Courts of Idleness (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1920), 88–108.
Raymond P Wallace, ‘Cardboard kingdoms’, in San José Studies, 13:2 (1987), 23–34.
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© 2015 Kate Macdonald
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Macdonald, K. (2015). Ex-Officers and Gentlemen: Yates in the 1920s. In: Novelists Against Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-45772-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-45772-1_3
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