This class focuses on women writers from the 1920s through the 1950s with an emphasis on the 30s. We read a novel a week. We may begin with an influential 1920s America writer, Anita Loos, and then move over to the superior country of England for the rest of the course. The point is two-fold: 1. to look at some under-read female writers like E. M. Delafield, Barbara Pym, and Gladys Mitchell and 2. to focus on the issues of privacy (we'll have section on fiction that takes the form of diaries) and forms of the public that attend it. We'll have a section on the country house novel as a genre, both in terms of how funny it can be (Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm) and how scary (Du Maurier's Rebecca); in keeping with the scary, or at least the pseudo-scary, we'll have a section on "Minds and Murder" where we stay at home with Miss Marple and go to the opera with Dame Bradley—the former a well-known spinster and the latter a forgotten (but not repressed) female psychoanalyst, two of the foremost fictional detectives of the so-called Golden Age of Mystery.

Students will write a series of brief response papers and a final paper. In total, there are three reasons you might take this class: 1. an interest in women's writing from an understudied period; 2. an interest in so-called middlebrow writing and a desire to interrogate the term; 3. an interest in what might be called the psychological and philosophical issues that go along with privacy: solipsism, sexuality, the construction of identity, I-Thou relations, or even, god help you, Wittgenstein's response to Russell on the issue of private language