In October 1929 thousands of members of Britain’s Book Society received a new hardback through the post. Whiteoaks, by an unfamiliar Canadian writer, Mazo de la Roche, was the seventh monthly ‘choice’ of the society, Britain’s first subscription book-of-the-month club, begun in April that same year. The novel confirmed the club’s taste for entertaining page-turners; books that were worth investing time and money in, though not too complex or ‘highbrow’. ‘No selection that the Book Society has made has given me so much pleasure as this one’ wrote the head of the selection committee, bestselling novelist Hugh Walpole, in the Graphic.
For almost 40 years the Book Society served tens of thousands of readers worldwide, choosing nearly 450 titles overall from a variety of publishers (judges assessed writers’ manuscripts pre-publication, with readers receiving the publisher’s first edition). Set up to boost book-buying when Britain was still ‘a nation of book-borrowers’ (according to Freddie Richardson, head librarian of Boots Book-lovers’ Library, which charged an annual fee to borrow new books), the aim was to help readers, support debut authors, and challenge some of the snobbery around who had access to new books. Thirty to 40 per cent of the society’s members lived overseas, many in what were then parts of the British Empire. Book Society collections have been discovered in homes in Canada, Tanzania, and India.
The Book Society was inspired by the American Book-of-the-Month Club, set up in 1926, which proved that a much wider reading public was keen to buy books than publishers realised. Trust in the judges was crucial and Hugh Walpole (later Sir Hugh, knighted for services to literature in 1937) was adamant that the names on the committee should reassure the public; no ‘cranks’ would be involved. The first set of judges was made up of his friends and colleagues: J.B. Priestley, who would enjoy his first major success that year with his novel The Good Companions; writer and critic Sylvia Lynd; dramatist Clemence Dane; and Oxford academic George Stuart Gordon. Later judges would include First World War poet Edmund Blunden and ‘30s’ Auden Group poet Cecil Day-Lewis.
Whiteoaks was the second instalment in what would become an international bestselling phenomenon, sprawling into a 16-volume saga published between 1927 and 1960. The story centres upon a large, aristocratic Canadian family, with characters caught between family and independence, modernity and tradition. The drama focuses on the wider interpersonal conflicts between generations, an illicit romance, and the crucial question of who will inherit Jalna, the Ontario manor house where the series is set.
Mazo de la Roche (born Maisie Roche) was not well known outside Canada or the US when the Book Society selected Whiteoaks. But Walpole was a fan, impressed by her 1927 novel Jalna (the first in the series and winner of the Atlantic Monthly prize for fiction). They shared a British publisher in Macmillan and Walpole was enchanted after meeting de la Roche in person, then on a European tour with her partner Caroline Clement.
In his review for the Book Society, Walpole declared that de la Roche had used creativity and imagination to produce a book that was compulsively readable ‘after ten years of autobiographical bitterness and sterility’. This was the Book Society’s stake in the interwar culture wars known as the ‘Battle of the Brows’. Whereas ‘modernist’ writers such as Richard Aldington, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own was also recommended by the Book Society in October 1929) were radically disrupting traditional ideas of character, plot, and realism, de la Roche was firmly sticking by them. Whiteoaks, thought judge Clemence Dane, was ‘more like real life than any book has the right to be’.
The Book Society sought to ‘help’ readers who felt left behind by modernism, which seemed to have turned its back on the so-called ‘New Reading Public’ (as early 20th-century working- and lower-middle-class readers, with more education and higher literacy rates, became known). In his 1928 society novel Wintersmoon Walpole includes a character called Wildherne. Though a war veteran, and well regarded in London club rooms, Wildherne is made to feel stupid by modernity:
Some of his Oxford acquaintances moved among writers and painters, but these seemed to care for things that he did not understand. He was not modern at all … The modern arts, when he touched them … seemed to him all negation. He felt himself slow, behind the times.
It was readers like Wildherne that the Book Society spoke to when they championed more accessible literature. ‘My friends and I are Broadbrows’, Priestley wrote in 1926:
The people who are for ever quarrelling with both High and Low, who snap their fingers at fashions, who only ask that a thing should have character and art, should be enthralling, and do not give a fig whether it is popular or unpopular, born in Blackburn or Baku, who do not denounce a piece of art because it belongs to a certain category but only ask that it shall be well done, shall have in it colour, grace, wit, pathos, humour or sublimity.
When the club collapsed in 1968 – partly due to a better public library service and the take-off of postwar paperbacks – its archives were lost, and its story forgotten. But the Book Society contributed to the success of many well-known titles, including Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), and Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1950).
Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Cultures at the University of Reading and the author of Recommended! The Influencers Who Changed How We Read (Holland House Books, 2025).