Kate Macdonald teaches British literature and publishing history in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. She researches twentieth-century British book culture, publishing history and popular reading, on which she has published widely.

Novelists Against Social Change studies the writing of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell to show how these conservative authors put their fears and anxieties into their best-selling fiction. Resisting the threats of change in social class, politics, the freedom of women, and professionalization produced their strongest works.