What’s Twee & What’s Not?

I’ve been thinking about the kind of books I read.  Classics, pop fiction, poetry, biography–anything except romances.

Ten years ago I collected and perused many out-of-print British novels by Rumer Godden, Dodie Smith, D. E. Stevenson,  Rachel Ferguson, and Pamela Frankau.

It’s been a while since I’ve read these authors, but I  wonder:  is my taste twee?

What’s twee and what’s not?   The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says it is “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.”

Can writers be great and twee?  I love Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady, a brilliant novel about a distressed gentlewoman.  But an earlier book, The Brontes Went to Woolworths, is so fanciful that I conclude it is twee. As the book description at Goodreads says, the Carne sisters “live a life unchecked by their mother in their bohemian town house. Irrepressibly imaginative, the sisters cannot resist making up stories as they have done since childhood; from their talking nursery toys, Ironface the Doll and Dion Saffyn the pierrot, to their fulsomely-imagined friendship with real high-court Judge Toddington…”

What about the brilliant, underrated writer, Rumer Godden?  She is usually delegated to the rank of dead pop writers, but  I adore  Kingfishers Catch Fire, a kind of pre-hippie novel about a single mother and two children who move to Kashmir to live cheaply.  But there is occasionally something mannered about her voice, her rhetorical repetition, and chronological jumping around.  I happen to like that myself.   Twee or not twee?

George Eliot:  never twee.  Max Beerbohm:  always twee.  I am definite about those two.