"A jazzed and patchwork modern": "future" girls and modern masculinities in the early popular romances of Berta Ruck

As a best-selling writer of popular romances during the first half of the twentieth century, Berta Ruck (1878-1978) has been characterised as a producer of 'omelettes of frivolity and sweetness' whose appeal was confined to adolescent girls and the servant classes. Closer attention to some of the early novels and to her own evaluation of her work, however, reveals her attempts to confront and articulate the impact of societal change upon a generation whose world was being irrevocably altered by the Great War and its aftermath. Her almost forensic attention to local detail and her treatment of contemporary questions of gender identity make her a compelling chronicler of the period and lend credibility to her claims of a broader readership than that generally associated with the genre.