Fiction for the Woman of To-day: The Modern Short Story in Eve

Abstract

This chapter explores short fiction published in Eve, later Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a magazine directed to ‘the woman of to-day and tomorrow’ in print between 1921-29. This elite English women’s paper was avowedly modern in outlook - debating new social roles for women, new ideas about psychology and sexuality, changing relations between the sexes and modernist aesthetics - at the same time as upholding traditional values such as respect for class hierarchy and marriage within its routine content of society gossip columns, fashion pages, travel writing and reviews of new books, art exhibitions and theatre. This chapter shows how the tension between modernity and convention was also reflected in the magazine’s short stories, which ranged from formulaic and conservative plots to experimental and subversive narratives. It reads stories by familiar and forgotten authors, including Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Anstruther, Marthe Troly-Curtin and Radclyffe Hall, that, in more or less radical ways, probed new models of femininity and new models for heterosexual relationships.