Lisa Stead

Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen

Abstract Existing accounts of Elinor Glyns career have emphasized her substantial impact on early Hollywood. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to her less successful efforts to break into the UK film industry in the early sound period. This article addresses this underexplored period, focusing on Glyns use of sound in her two 1930 British films, Knowing Men and The Price of Things. The article argues that Glyns British production practices reveal a unique strategy for reformulating her authorial stardom through the medium of the ‘talkie’. It explores how Glyn sought to exploit the specifically national qualities of the recorded English voice amidst a turbulent period in UK film production. The article contextualizes this strategy in relation to Glyns business and personal archives, which evidence her attempts to refine her own speaking voice, alongside those of the screen stars whose careers she sought to develop for recorded sound. It suggests that the sound film was marked out as an important, exploitable new tool for Glyn within a broader context of debates about voice, recorded sound and nationality in UK culture at this time. This enabled her to portray a distinctively national brand identity through her new film work and surrounding publicity, in contrast to her appearances in American silent films. The article will show that recorded sound further allowed Glyn performatively to foreground her role as author-director through speaking cameos. This is analysed in relation to wider evidence of her practice, where she reflected on the performative qualities of the spoken voice in her writing and interviews, and made use of radio, newsreel and live performance to perfect and refine her own skills in recitation and oration.

“Dear Cinema Girls”: Girlhood, Picturegoing and the Interwar Film Magazine

This chapter explores the intersection of discourses on British girlhood and the film fan magazine in the interwar period. Whilst national print media had developed a substantial body of film magazines that broadly targeted and solicited a female readership in this period, a particular thread of this discourse was aimed at younger readers and fans. In their advertising, serialisation of recent film fictions and courtship of readers through competitions and letter writing, fan magazines used film culture to communicate with an emergent image of the young female cinemagoer. In the process, magazines like Girls’ Cinema constructed a film inflected girlhood, channeled through both a shared community of cinemagoing experiences and the interaction of girl fans with models of youthful femininity on and off the screen. Magazines structured interactive spaces and distinct modes of address for a youth readership; some papers included “young picturegoer” sections, others retained a core focus on youthful starlets as a touch point for their readers, particularly through the figure of the adult-adolescent construct “Little Mary” Pickford. They also borrowed and adapted an intimate mode of address from their working girl story paper counterparts to construct the reader as friend and confidant, linked to a wider community of young readers through their shared tastes and desires. The film fan magazine could be a place for young female readers to both learn by example from their favourite stars, but also to access advice on social etiquette, fashion, dance and courtship through gossip pages and question and answer sections, using film as a backdrop for navigating contemporary models of girlhood. The chapter pays specific attention to the ways in which the magazines crafted a distinctly national set of discourses on young female cinemagoing and star consumption, navigating an often conflicting pull between glamour and restraint, modernity and tradition. In the process, it examines how print media mediated a wider set of discourses concerning the perceived vulnerability of the film fan girl, simultaneously at the centre of both a network of media soliciting their attention, time and money, and of more widespread cultural concerns about the lowbrow reputation and potentially damaging effects of film fictions and cinema environments.

Off to the Pictures

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.

Bristol Deaf Memories: archives, nostalgia and the loss of community space in the deaf community in Bristol

Abstract The deaf community in the UK has undergone major changes in recent years, which has uprooted it from its traditional foundations, the deaf club and deaf residential school. This article examines the effect of the closure of the deaf club in Bristol, a city in the South West of England, which resulted in the loss of an important community place and spaces for deaf people in the city. We discuss, with a strong focus on methodology, a community event celebrating Bristol’s deaf heritage organised by the research team which utilised archive materials, including archived actuality footage. This article draws on interview data elicited from participants in that event to explore the meanings connected to space and place in both past and present by the deaf community in Bristol. Concepts of the rhizome and the smooth and striated spaces of Deleuze and Guattari were found to be useful models with which to engage with the contemporary struggles of the deaf community for community recognition and organisation. We also suggest an online mapping application which enables the practice of rhizomatic cartography could be a way forward in preserving the deaf heritage and history of the city.

Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and BusinesswomanV. BARNETT & A. WEEDON

on which family histories can be written, updated, and sometimes overwritten. The words ‘Nancy Butler Died Feb 3 1842 Aged 20 mo’, rendered in enormous letters on the quilt made by her eponymous grandmother, make physical the magnitude of her grief. Elsewhere, enduring threads of family recognition, affection and remembrance are expressed through the quilts and samplers which, in sometimes very moving circumstances, were updated by successive generations. Newell argues that just as the teaching of needlework skills was a conversation across the generations, so the giving and receiving of highly personal needlework was an act which affirmed the identities of givers, receivers and later generations. A Stitch in Time is the beautifully illustrated product of Newell’s PhD research. It includes detailed information about the provenance of each piece of needlework, and descriptions of materials and means of construction. Common to much women’s history is the absence of first-hand autobiographical accounts, and here, as elsewhere in studies of domestic life, this factor throws much emphasis on the need for perceptive interpretation. But, using her archive resources with skill, Newell has written a lively, insightful and detailed historical study which shows how a particular group of American women drew on their age and experience to use needlework as a creative and determined form of self-representation.

Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

Successful women filmmakers are a rare breed. The statistics for female directors working on top grossing films continues to be woefully small. To be a woman who directs is to face systematic disad...

‘The big romance’: Winifred Holtby and the fictionalisation of women's cinemagoing in interwar Yorkshire

This article explores fictive accounts of womens cinemagoing in Winifred Holtbys middlebrow interwar literature. The article looks at the ways in which Holtbys writing engaged with notions of female self-fashioning in relation to screen fictions through her novels The Crowded Street (1924) and South Riding: an English landscape (1936). More specifically, the article explores how Holtbys novels present a consideration of cinemas influence upon womens lives and selfhoods as mediated through local and regional contexts of reception in her descriptions of rural and urban Yorkshire. The article begins by examining the practice of cinemagoing for women in Yorkshire during the interwar years, and moves to explore the contribution of cinema to cultural representations of femininity in this period, considering the ways in which Holtby used middlebrow fiction to actively critique cinemas more negative representations, whilst shaping a defence of women and cinema more generally within British interwar modernity.