Books and the Home: Literary Taste as an Expression of Female Identity.

Abstract

The personal, often contradictory responses to MO directives reveal how women navigated the relationship between reading, identity, and social expectations, particularly in their engagement with genre fiction such as Mills & Boon. With additional time, it may be illuminating to extend a similar methodology into a study on reading habits in the twenty-first century, focusing in particular on the influence of social media on the position of romance novels within the literary hierarchy. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that MO material, by preserving the idiosyncrasies of personal experience, illustrates the different ways in which women asserted personal autonomy through their choice and organisation of literature.