Product Description: Scholars of the middlebrow have demonstrated that the preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot s famous attack on Silly Novels by Lady Novelists set the tone for the long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction a controversy which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows...read more