The diverse literary forms emergent from interwar culture demonstrate the centrality of cinema-going to women's evolving sense of selfhood during the period. Literary representations of women's cinema-going play upon both the conservative and disruptive potential of film, using it as a tool for forging new understandings of domestic, professional, public and private gendered selves. Two primary modes of such self-fashioning emerge from women's film writings. In the first instance, cinema offered identity templates, presenting new role models and alternative gender representations for female spectators to use, adapt or discard. At the same time, cinema gave women a tool for creating new identities as writers, journalists, authors, filmmakers and stars.

Both of these modes evidence the centrality of processes of negotiation, or ‘offsetting’ in women's encounters with cinema culture. Again and again in short stories, novels, criticism and serialisations, both cinema-going characters and the creators of film fictions use cinema-going as a vehicle for working through a variety of pressures and conflicts in women's interwar experience. The pleasures of popular culture are offset against the problematic and restrictive representations that this culture contained. Equally, the social and physical freedoms that cinemas as public leisure spaces offered women are offset against the ways in which cinema-going conversely regulated their movement, made their public presence spectacular and produced new pressures to conform to standardised modes of gendered, class-inflected and regional subjectivities. To unpack this idea further, I return once more to Elizabeth Bowen, turning here to her non-fiction reflection on the value of cinema-going at the close of the interwar period: