British Authorship and Americanization in the Age of Silent Cinema

How did the rise of cinema affect authorship in Britain? This essay examines the question in relation to both new and established writers. Referring to manuals of authorship and fiction writing as well as to the archives of the Society of Authors, it places the rise of cinema after 1906 in the context of the wider “Americanization” of the British culture industry and illustrates the ways in which cinema drove changes to readerly expectation, advertising, and the marketing of literature. It also examines how the business of writing for the cinema came to be incorporated into the broadly professionalized concept of “authorship.” In addition to drawing from the experiences of fiction writers including W. Somerset Maugham, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Elinor Glyn, Arnold Bennet, and Edgar Jepson, it also considers cinema authors, Herbert Langford Reed and Eliot Stannard, who sought to integrate screenwriting with the other disciplines traditionally described by the term authorship, widening our sense of what that category might mean.