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.

Lisa Stead is a Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the co-editor of The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (2013). Her essays on fandom, archives and women’s cinema have appeared in Women’s History Review and Transformative Works and Cultures, among other publications.