'I return with immense relief to old friend Time and Tide': Middlebrow Expansions in E. M. Delafield's Fiction and Journalism

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, the feminist weekly review Time and Tide sought to navigate between its increasingly highbrow aspirations and its longstanding affiliations with women's middlebrow culture. This essay considers how Time and Tide's continuous and increasingly complex negotiations among the high and middlebrow spheres at the height of the ‘battle of the brows’ encouraged the development of a more innovative and assertive women's middlebrow culture. I trace the career of E.M. Delafield from her somewhat ambivalent association with the middlebrow to her forthright participation within that sphere and her creation of a middlebrow style with greater independence from modernism that upheld the significance and humour in everyday life; her journalism with Time and Tide serves as the conduit for this evolution. Thus at a time when the middlebrow was repeatedly misaligned, obscured, or controlled, Time and Tide used its own growing cultural capital to encourage Delafield's fashioning of a middlebrow culture committed to humour, the everyday, and cultural variability. © 2011, Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.