Books That Endure

Chapter 1: “Books That Endure,” argues that in an era when literary criticism was increasingly the purview of university professors, Dane cultivated alternative forms of authority in Good Housekeeping . In her dual roles of literary expert and common reader, Dane linked successful innovation to enduring patterns, defended broadbrow taste, and modeled holistic reading that engaged readers’ intellectual, somatic, moral, and emotional faculties. In constructing multi-faceted women readers, Dane made a major contribution to Good Housekeeping’s mission to address the full scope of modern women’s lives. At the convergence of journalism and literature and spanning ten years, Dane’s corpus of book essays offers valuable data for study of the period’s discursive construction of high and low art. Focusing on four book essays to illustrate Dane’s essay craft and critical principles, the chapter contends that interwar women’s magazines could be engines of literary culture; and it demonstrates that Dane helped establish Good Housekeeping as a para-curricular forum that guided and informed the self-improving woman.