The book's popularity confirmed her greatest fear: that, for all her effort, it would be received not as a literary work but as middlebrow. The critics who mattered had passed it 'over as lightweight and unimportant.' She stopped eating and retreated to bed.
The cultural conflict that defined its reception-between 'lightweight and unimportant' middlebrow writing and the highbrow literary fiction that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s-is one of the central preoccupations of the novel itself. Beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit.
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