I’m currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester, where I’m working on a research project about lesbian writing and representation in mid-twentieth-century “middlebrow” fiction. Falling as it does between the construction of a modern lesbian identity in the 1920s and the politics of visibility and ‘coming out’ from the late 1960s, the mid-century challenges many of our dominant ways of understanding lesbian genders and sexualities. In this period, we find ways of thinking about (what we might now call) lesbianism and/or transmasculinity that refuse or unsettle the values that came to define queer politics.

My research problematises hierarchies of artistic value in queer culture, spotlighting writing that might be conventional, flawed, or just plain bad, and integrating this into the queer literary history of the twentieth century. Through this questioning of aesthetic categories, “middlebrow” fiction gives us a space to think through how lesbians have been invested in conservatism, individualism, racism, classism, misogyny, privacy, and respectability. By making this unheroic queer tradition visible, we have a better chance of tackling its afterlives in the present.

Writers who interest me include Mary Renault, Josephine Tey, Pamela Frankau, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Thirkell, Agatha Christie, Nancy Spain, E.F. Benson, Barbara Pym, Naomi Mitchison, Dorothy L. Sayers, Hope Mirrlees, Nancy Mitford, Sylvia Townsend Warner and E.M. Delafield.