Potterism

Potterism is a novel by the English writer Rose Macaulay, published in 1920 by Boni and Liveright. It takes its title from the habits of the Potter family, whose newspapers and magazines are read by a very large and not very demanding public.

Mrs Potter is the family's most successful author: her cheap romances run in the shop-girls' magazines her husband publishes, and their success has given her a confidence in her own judgement that her writing cannot support. She has reached a point where she cannot reliably separate the fiction she manufactures from the facts of her own life. When her son-in-law is murdered, she sets out to establish the truth of it and consults a medium, and the damage she does in the process spreads through the people around her.

Arthur Gideon, an editor on the staff of Mr Potter's newspapers, watches the family at work with an insider's knowledge of how stories are chosen, and the novel's target is a press culture in which what is printed and what is true have come apart.