Riding The Tosh Horse

David Tanner

• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781839527210
• Edition: 0

The romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell was a recluse, and actively avoided marketing herself as a personality in any way, but her formula was successful. She reached a very large audience publishing 98 titles and earning, at the height of her career, about AGBP4M annually in today's values. Her plots included a popular and heady mix of heterosexual, implicit same-sex relationships, sexual deviances, gratuitous violence, death and exoticised notions of Empire and masculinity. Although being publishing alongside literary giants she was vilified by the establishment no doubt jealous of her substantial earnings. With an escapist and non-literary appeal to a lower middle class reader universe Ethel used a very successful multi-media marketing strategy with magazine serialisation, hard copy books, film, theatre and radio to reach this audience in the UK, the United States, Europe and the British colonies. A forerunner to Mills and Boom's success Ethel was very influential in setting the scene for mass market romantic fiction. Barbara Cartland stated that Ethel was her greatest influence.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Background to a Recluse
• 2. The Biographical Environment
• 3. Peer Envy, Perhaps
• 4. A Remarkably Driven Novelist
• 5. A Cloistered, Conflicted and Wealthy Family
• 6. The Siblings’ Stimuli
• 7. Relationships and Wealth
• 8. Health, Sickness and Drugs
• 9. Dislike of Adventure, Kind and Socially Naïve
• 10. The Lampooned Style
• 11. An Understanding of Ethel’s Writing
• 12. Ethel and The New Woman
• 13. The Humour
• 14. The Empire and Notions of Masculinity
• 15. Violence, Sexuality and Male and Female Roles
• 16. Religion and Moral Musings
• 17. Ethel’s Hidden Philosophies
• 18. The Reading Public and Reading Environment
• 19. Poetry
• 20. Literary Influences
• 21. Marketing and Selling
• 22. The Marketing Mix and Magazines
• 23. Films
• 24. The Theatre
• 25. An Invisible yet Successful Catharsis
• 26. Ethel’s Creative Catalysts
• 27. The Foci of Ethel’s Lampooned Style
• 28. The Dell Family Tree
• 29. Ethel’s Forty-one Year Output
• 30. Title Historiography and Creative Levers
• 31. American Magazine Story Environments
• 32. Film Productions
• 33. Photographs and Illustrations
• Ethel’s Major Titles: An Indication of Volume Output
• Index
• Bibliography
• Notes and Sources