Marriage, collaboration, and the literary mass market in the English-speaking world, c. 1870–1939

This article offers the first comprehensive history of Anglo-American married couples who co-published together, c. 1870–1939. It departs from the tendency to solely focus on the detrimental impact of marriage on women’s professional lives and the framing of middle-class women as simply either marrying or working as ‘spinsters’ before the Great War. It instead centres couples who together carved out enviable new positions, arguing these endeavours should be recognised as a growing socio- cultural phenomenon of this era. Moreover, it unpacks the significance of the prominent public discourse circulated to readers across the English- speaking-world about such relationships. The most ‘popular’ partnerships were celebrated as simultaneously ‘exceptional’ collaborators and ‘ordinary’ married couples. Their dual-working lifestyles and intellectual compatibility was held up as holding the key to unlocking greater marital happiness. However, invested in carving out their roles in a deeply hierarchical, capitalist world, ‘popular’ couples often remade and propagated regressive ideas about gender, class, and racialised difference. Still, the article contends that the paradoxes in this discourse facilitated the creation of an imaginative space where readers could explore and self-actualise new perspectives about the ways they, and those around them, might partake in work cultures and intimate relationships in twentieth-century society.