"I want to see something different": The Middlebrow Diary Novel and Elizabeth von Arnim's In the Mountains

Abstract

Abstract: This article reads Elizabeth von Arnim's In the Mountains (1920) as one of the first middlebrow diary novels, an intimate and comedic genre that has received little scholarly attention. I argue that In the Mountains provides an alternative to the modernist postwar lament through a Victorian-inspired, middlebrow modality. Far from "tittle tattle" written by "middlebred" hedge-amblers, as Virginia Woolf describes the genre, the middlebrow diary novel uses the cycles of female life (adolescence, courtship, marriage, motherhood, aging, widowhood) to structure its narratives. Though In the Mountains begins in a state of mourning, von Arnim relies upon the familiar forms of the comedy of manners, the diary, and the marriage plot to rehabilitate both reader and diarist from their collective trauma. Previous scholarship on von Arnim overlooks In the Mountains ; this article suggests that analysis of this provocative novel has much to contribute to the fields of both diary and middlebrow studies.