Winifred Holtby and the Fevered (Middle)Brow

Abstract Placing Holtby’s writing in extended dialogue with Woolf’s, this chapter argues that the pathological canon missed in ‘On Being Ill’ is partly realized in the period’s middlebrow writing, which contests the topic of embodiment with Woolf’s preferred highbrow. The gendered category of middlebrow—associated by Woolf with ‘invalidish ladies’—is linked to the gendering of illness as female. The chapter also discusses the role of cinema in distinguishing brows, and its use in South Riding as an opposing artistic force to sickness, signifying illusion and insubstantiality. Reading Holtby’s popular journalism the author argues that illness provides a way of gently satirizing middle-class moral domestic values. South Riding and Anderby Wold show models of female identity that are identified with illness and its care. These are not, however, oppressive but often liberating, providing a field in which women acquire and enact expertise, authority, and power in the interwar period.