The mainstay of fairy tales and most romances, feminine beauty in this sort of literature is usually raised to incredible (and incredulous) heights as synonymous with virtue, goodness and truth.
In, however, the England of the 1930s and later, a minor revolution occurs against this sort of pap: Georgette Heyer and Angela Thirkell. More on Heyer later, who particularly had it in for these babes but, starting with Thirkell below:
Author Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was the first cousin once removed of Rudyard Kipling. After a couple of disastrous marriages Thirkell supported herself through cheery, satirical novels on the inhabitants of Barsetshire, a setting originally created by earlier English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), the "fictitious English county of Barsetshire (located roughly in the West Country) and its cathedral town of Barchester", lots of clergy and gentry involved.
In Cheerfulness Breaks In (1940), Thirkell does a delicious and comic takedown of fatuous beauty Rose Birkett who is finally safely wedded on the eve of WWII. Thirkell then goes on to a compendium of plainer, but far more capable and virtuous women including, it seems, consideration of the situation of the Misses Hampton and Bent who are vaguely scrutinized by Thirkell's central protagonist, Mrs. Laura Morland, also a writer and the female character who holds the Barsetshire sketches together:
Mrs. Morland muses on Mrs. Bissell's business-like acceptance of "the sinister implications of Adelina Cottage" shared by Miss Hampton and Miss Bent.
Frankly, the meaning of sinister seems rather broadened to mean plucky women who can drink anyone under the table, have a handle on the best booze available, stalwart Tories who are ready in an instant to do their best for the community's good, ever onward and upward.
Cheerfulness also includes a memorable children's Christmas party which teeters dangerously toward a sectarian war among a coterie of Roman Catholic nuns, Baptist Papist haters, C. of E. Tories and a cadre of leftist pinko radical socialist educationists nearly triggered by bumbling Balkan provocateurs (Shades of WWI? Preshadowing today's Syria?).
Georgette Heyer (1902-1974), detective and Regency Romance, is not so kind. Evil drama queens, that's what they are, starting with beautiful drama queen Rosemary Kane (whose grandfather was a Russian) in They Found Him Dead (1938) who seems to eerily foreshadow Ayn Rand. Many of the characters therein move on to Duplicate Death (1969) which features brainless, heedless, drug-addled Cynthia Haddington, with a sidebar of multisexuality (by the way, gay men also do not come off very well by Heyer).
Heyer's Regencies feature totally bonkers beauty Julia Oversley in The Civil Contract (1961), and the hideously, innocently evil Theophania (Tiffany) Wield in The Nonesuch (1962). In contrast, Heyer raises very plain, unbeautiful Drusila Morville to heroine status in The Quiet Gentleman (1951), and very plain, unlovely Jenny Chawleigh Lynton comes off royally in contrast to the hysterical Julia in The Contract.
Heyer also dashes lyrical, romantic love to the ground in A Blunt Instrument (1938), featuring in counterpoint the dreadfully sappy and filled with drama marriage of Helen and John North contrasted with the low-key courtship of Neville Fletcher and Sally Drew, writer and sister of the sappy Helen North:
“By the way, if you should run across a forceful young woman with a monocle, God help you! She’s Mrs North’s sister,and interested in crime. Writes detective stories."
Heyer also bashes nonconformist religionists who spout scripture to somewhat comic effect in this one.
It should also be noted that neither Thirkell nor Heyer enjoyed the felicity of a happy marriage. Sorry for them -- but fortunate for the comic literary scene.