Highlights the work of middlebrow authors who employ Gothic conventions to interrogate and subvert the idealization of domestic family and marital life following the trauma of the First and Second World Wars.
The essays in Middlebrow Gothic include new perspectives on well-known authors such as Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as recovering less-studied authors including Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell), Elizabeth Taylor, and Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler), demonstrating their valuable contributions to the history and evolution of Gothic literature. The fictions discussed reveal "home sweet home" to be anything but a sanctuary; the middle-class family home is rather a sinister site of buried secrets, paranoia, and violence that spreads beyond the house to the social spaces and landscapes that lie beyond.