Capturing the last of England

The book is interesting because it has insights and novelty, not least in taking a period and a culture regarded by many as second best compared with what was happening elsewhere at the time, and shows it to have been enlightened, intelligent and full of beauty. However, it infuriates partly because of the author’s occasionally cloying and highly adjectival style, and partly because, for all her scholarship in the subject, one gets the sense that she has spread herself too broadly and lacks a feel for the real popular currents of the Twenties and Thirties.

The book is certainly ambitious. Not only does Harris examine the paradoxes of these modernists looking back to a romantic past in mainstream arts such as novels, poetry, painting and architecture; she also looks at the more peripheral areas of culture, such as food, weather, village life and music. She certainly supports the thesis implicit in her subtitle — that there was a conspicuous exercise of the imagination by creative artists in this period, and both Woolf and Piper are taken as prime examples of the paradox she describes.