Britannia’s Daughters: Popular Romance Fiction and the Ideology of National Superiority (1950s-1970s)

Abstract

From the introduction: In romances written in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Suez Crisis, a time when the UK was in decline as an imperial power, Pérez-Gil identifies an underlying “belief in Britain’s superiority, and the occasional imperialist residue underlying this belief.” In these novels the British heroine embodies the nation’s superiority, and the “freedom and independence enjoyed by British women are measured against the submissiveness that often defines southern European women.