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Romantic Moderns
In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.
Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern”
need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.
A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,
and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.
416 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2010
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568 people want to read
About the author
Alexandra Harris
13 books26 followersAlexandra Harris is a British writer and academic.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
May 18, 2017
I had had my eye on Alexandra Harris' Romantic Moderns for quite a while before picking it up, both as a generally interesting piece of writing, and an aid to my PhD thesis. Physically, it is a gorgeous tome, with heavy cream paper, and lavish colour illustrations throughout. In her book, Harris discusses the 'modern English renaissance' which occurred during the 1930s and 1940s in quite staggering detail. She unpicks the period, looking at art, architecture, the nature of possessions, literature, and reclaiming heritage, amongst others. Whilst a lot of the art did not personally appeal to me, I found the wording and things which Harris touched upon fascinating on the whole. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the modernisation of cookery, and weather. I am also fascinated by the English village, and found the chapter which deals with its preservation far-reaching and insightful. Harris writes wonderfully; her style is at times academic, but feels readily accessible to a wider audience.
July 27, 2011
I can't join in the applause this book has been receiving. I think the argument of the book isn't very well made, and I suppose I have a slight aversion to the Little Englandism the artists, musicians, architects and writers covered in the book embody. This is supposed to be a revisionist cultural history of the 30's and 40's arguing that England was not in fact the backward, Modernism hating country people say it was, and that our thinkers and creatives produced a native, somewhat conservative version of Modernism that is as valid as what was coming out of France or Spain or Germany. I don't think Harris' argument is very revisionist. I don't think anyone is arguing that English creatives didn't adopt some of the features of Modernism, but we produced very few full-blooded Modernists other than a few examples such as Virginia Woolf compared to other major European countries. I think this is demonstrated by how few of the creatives and artists who were around at this time had any influence or impact beyond our shores. The world wasn't paying attention to Betjamin the way they were to Rilke or Lorca, and they weren't blown away by the paintings or John Piper as they were by Picasso or Kandinsky. I also hate the insistance of several of the figures covered in this but, and endorsed by Harris, that Englishness is this cosy, rustic thing, redolent of villiage greens and quaint churches and elevenses. It ignores the violent, strident, dynamic Englishness of the civil war, or the industrial revolution or the largest empire the world has ever seen. Furthermore, reading this has convinced me that I should never read Brideshead Revisited. I love Vile Bodies and Scoop, but it sounds like Waugh really lost it later.
August 10, 2013
The 1930s and early 1940s were a critical period in the formation of British culture. The Second World War was to mark a decisive turning point, one that created a self-image for many Britons that, though now under pressure from the dominance of a multi-cultural globalist London, imbued them with a sense of their own 'difference' from Europe based on a nostalgia for aristocracy, country and rural community.
Alexandra Harris' solid contribution to cultural history provides a welcome summary of that process - the more conservative side, the creation of a 'modernising' neo-romanticism epitomised by artists and illustrators such as John Piper, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Ivon Hitchens and Rex Whistler but also by many writers and intellectuals, photographers, eccentrics, garden designers, architects and others.
She argues persuasively that the middle class English mind (she does not argue in class terms and that she does not place her narrative within a wider historical context is a weakness) adopted the intrusive modernist European culture in the early interwar period only to adapt it in the 1930s to a more conservative, traditionalist and earth-bound and ruralist subject matter.
She writes well although she falls into the classic trap of being so determined to do justice to specific works and writers that interesting little gobbets of data about key figures overwhelm any sense of a grand narrative. Sometimes one wonders whether she has actually demonstrated her thesis rather than suggested that she might be able to demonstrate it when she has stopped entertaining us.
Each chapter is like an essay but the accumulation of essays does not quite present the persuasive argument that it should, especially as there is an almost wilful neglect of the equally or more dominant trends that drove the 'progressive' middle class and the popular culture of the working class. Not that she should have discussed these other trends in any depth (which was not her mission) but only that it might have been useful if we had been given a better idea in passing of what was competing for the attention of the public.
By way of a small example, we may take the short reference to a film of significance - Powell and Pressburger's 'A Canterbury Tale'. This is a wartime propaganda piece of 1944 which can easily be found on YouTube and is a minor masterpiece of the neo-romantic sensibility. Her account of it is excellent and insightful but short and, because the nuances are not covered from lack of space and of interest in the sociology of culture, unintentionally potentially misleading.
The film is propaganda precisely because, by 1944, the conservative middle classes in the country had been relatively neglected in terms of mass mobilisation. Although the urban characters are definitely ruralised into some conservative values (partly to appeal to the evidently targeted mid-Western American audience that also needed to be persuaded of the value of coming sacrifices), the bottom line is still a message like Colonel Blimp's - the world has changed and you have to change too.
The country squire who pours glue into girls' hair is let off the hook because he is a decent conservative cove but he is left alone at the end, ignored even as a petty criminal of sorts. So much Harris 'gets' but the message that there is, in fact, no room for pure traditionalism is, I believe, much more strongly expressed than is implied.
This is not about traditionalists using modern methods in support of traditional values but something quite different - a respect for the junior role of traditional values and skills within an essentially modernist ideology of victory, planning and reconstruction. This is closer by an edge to Soviet support for Uzbek folk dancing than it is to the values of most of the writers and artists outlined in the book.
Artists also have to eat so we have Shell's important patronage of the neo-romantics to consider (and the neo-romantic aspects of the Festival of Britain) in much the same terms - the appropriation of traditionalist memes and images for essentially modernist purposes, reversing at this point the originating thesis of Harris' book which is the appropriation of modernist ideas and techniques to reinvigorate traditional arts (where she is absolutely right in her analysis).
Interestingly the film did not do particularly well critically at the time. It is instructive that, lauded though they are today, neo-romantic ideas did not really reach into popular or even elite culture until after the war and sponsorship by very modern institutions such as advertising agencies and government information operations far from the church and the village artistic community.
This was, however, an important element in the revolt against war socialism that led to the return of a conservative government. Britain had incorporated traditionalist memes and forms but it had no intention of doing anything more than that.
The aggressive nostalgia of Brideshead Revisited and the clever appropriation of rural romanticism by Shell both kick-started a rediscovery of past and country but the 'visitors' are clearly detached - both country and aristocracy are safely tamed for viewing. The modern National Trust visitor dutifully plods through the state rooms of its properties but he or she cannot wait to settle down in the old kitchens with a decent cup of tea and a 'home made' cake.
The modern leisured middle class, whether middle aged, retired or in family mode, communes not with the grand history of dates and family trees but with the invented memory of their own past. Their ancestors were far more likely to have been in service than been a Despenser or a Beckford. The sub-text is that Middle England now owns its own past (through its memberships) even if there are rules as to when you can take tea and when visit.
The monster of aristocratic privilege is tamed, much as Nosferatu becomes a children's cartoon with the passing of sufficient generations. The substance of Britain was already 'modern' in the 1930s let alone the 1950s. The greater the modernisation, the bigger the possibility of a 'safe space' to be allocated for the former monstrous oppressive powers of lords and prelates.
Harris' book is thus particularly important because she outlines all the many 'tools' that were available for the next generation of appropriators seeking a more settled Britain, tools that could be derived from the antiquarian and rural sensibility of the 1930s. The neo-romantic advertisements for Shell were naturally succeeded by the steady saving of country houses for the middle classes to do their 'Downton Abbey' act later while green belts emerged to let ribbon developments breathe.
We must grateful for this yet see it for it what it is - after all, it was often the Left that seemed as keen as anyone to preserve what was left of the past precisely because it contained no threat. It could be captured much like Labour had captured the State itself in 1945. Nevertheless, as the decades passed, a wider conservative traditionalist mentality emerged and became locked into the suburban and small town mentality of the English middle classes.
It might include country Anglicanism (visiting churches rather than services), the National Trust (actually a very efficient and modern organisation), repeated watching of variants of 'Brideshead Revisited' (rediscovered for manufactured nostalgia every two or three decades either directly or through bastardised copies such as 'Downton' and wholly dependent on the very modern medoum of television), English gardening and English cooking.
To many Britons, this neo-romantic idyll is pretty well what England now is outside London(with appropriate regional variants). The book itself starts with a church font and ends with a country house. Everything between these two symbolic artefacts of man seems to be a a gloss on 'modern' responses to a once-dominant Anglican faith and to a lost aristocracy. Perhaps, Harris likes it all a bit too much but that is her privilege. It is all very beautiful in its way even if much of it is fake.
Another bookend is more intellectual, between the cold platonic formalism of Fry and the Bloomsbury set on the one hand and the somewhat deadly idealistic communitarian cultural theory of Leavis. Both thinkers represent all that was dreary in those intellectuals who pontificated from high on what was appropriate and what was not. The irony of contemporary criticism of the Victorians is that many of their critics never broke free of the same fundamentalist judgmentalism.
Harris' reading, however, of Virginia Woolf is particularly interesting because she gives good cause to see her as symbolic of the flow from urban formalism to a more nuanced position. There is further work to be done perhaps on Woolf as psycho-geographer. Somehow, I found it hard to grasp what precisely Harris wanted to say about her but that may be my fault and not hers.
The more radical conservative aspects are also covered in pieces on T S Eliot and Rolf Gardiner and, though modernists who remained modernists tended to the left (albeit a somewhat authoritarian Left), you can see, without making it a rule, the shift into church and community over time of many other significant figures.
But why no mention of Eric Gill? Is it sheer embarrassment at what we know of his sexual proclivities? Yet it is hard not see him as central to the merging of modernist simplicity and Christianity, well in advance others. The silence is all the stranger when we consider the importance placed by Harris on the Midland Hotel in Morecombe and the fact that Spencer gets a mention.
There is also surprisingly limited coverage of the Inklings. They were meeting in and around Oxford precisely duruing the period in question and, though never modernists, they represented an essential bridge to Christian fantasy. Perhaps Tolkien might have been off topic but Charles Williams should not be - his account of a village play at the heart of Descent into Hell should have been grist to Harris' mill.
Perhaps we should not complain that there is no real wider context for the movement such as it was, no sense of how these shifts related to the rise of left-wing responses to European fascism, nor of how it might have been an attempt to construct a uniquely liberal English 'third way' a-political strategy of cultural withdrawal in the context of depression, war and, increasingly, death duties. The neo-romantic impulse, with added modernity, is the nostalgic love affair of the English middle class with a no-longer-threatening aristocracy.
Harris points out Waugh's evident and successful strategy of creating allies in the middle classes against socialism and it is true that, at this point in history, as across Europe, the middle classes were coming to prefer the now weakened conservative devil they knew to the devil of world-changing working class and urban organisation. While one part of British middle class culture was becoming deeply engaged in 'issues' and becoming earnest (Orwell being a good example), this other element was slipping into a sort of anti-decadent 'art for nearly art's sake' (in which religious and rural themes gave meaning as subjects).
This is the turn when old Liberal England (whose political death was quite sudden), which had thought itself the permanent sole rival to conservative England with the organised working classes well in hand, started to realise that the game had changed. Progressive Fabians might have stuck with their alliance with the rising trades unions but most middle class people soon felt threatened by state corporatism. The liberal-minded doctor might have come to be suspicious of the plans for a National Health Service.
A shift from modernism to neo-romanticism in aesthetic terms is precisely that political shift from traditional conservatism towards modern conservatism that was articulated by Stanley Baldwin (PM thre times until 1937) and which now provides the basis for the last gasp of old Etonian leadership in Johnson, Osborne and Cameron today.
Those on the Left are often puzzled that three Old Etonians straight out of Waugh are running one of the two great parties of state (much as Tories are puzzled that two brothers can be rivals in an apparently anti-aristocratic party of the Left!) The fact that it scarcely matters to half of the English is partly explained by this book.
Our Old Etonians are simply reversals of the Disraeli deal - that is, where once the aristocrats hired a middle class guy and gave him a mini-version of their own large country houses, the conservative middle classes hire Old Etonians as ersatz aristocrats to deliver their otherwise broadly liberal prejudices along conservative lines.
A final word of praise for Thames & Hudson. The illustrations are not only apposite and beautifully printed but, in nearly every case, actually relate directly to their references in the text, minimising that bug bear of non-fiction reading - having to abandon the page to go and rummage through a block of illustrations elsewhere.
All in all, an entertaining and well written book which is recommended for anyone interested in English cultural history.
Alexandra Harris' solid contribution to cultural history provides a welcome summary of that process - the more conservative side, the creation of a 'modernising' neo-romanticism epitomised by artists and illustrators such as John Piper, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Ivon Hitchens and Rex Whistler but also by many writers and intellectuals, photographers, eccentrics, garden designers, architects and others.
She argues persuasively that the middle class English mind (she does not argue in class terms and that she does not place her narrative within a wider historical context is a weakness) adopted the intrusive modernist European culture in the early interwar period only to adapt it in the 1930s to a more conservative, traditionalist and earth-bound and ruralist subject matter.
She writes well although she falls into the classic trap of being so determined to do justice to specific works and writers that interesting little gobbets of data about key figures overwhelm any sense of a grand narrative. Sometimes one wonders whether she has actually demonstrated her thesis rather than suggested that she might be able to demonstrate it when she has stopped entertaining us.
Each chapter is like an essay but the accumulation of essays does not quite present the persuasive argument that it should, especially as there is an almost wilful neglect of the equally or more dominant trends that drove the 'progressive' middle class and the popular culture of the working class. Not that she should have discussed these other trends in any depth (which was not her mission) but only that it might have been useful if we had been given a better idea in passing of what was competing for the attention of the public.
By way of a small example, we may take the short reference to a film of significance - Powell and Pressburger's 'A Canterbury Tale'. This is a wartime propaganda piece of 1944 which can easily be found on YouTube and is a minor masterpiece of the neo-romantic sensibility. Her account of it is excellent and insightful but short and, because the nuances are not covered from lack of space and of interest in the sociology of culture, unintentionally potentially misleading.
The film is propaganda precisely because, by 1944, the conservative middle classes in the country had been relatively neglected in terms of mass mobilisation. Although the urban characters are definitely ruralised into some conservative values (partly to appeal to the evidently targeted mid-Western American audience that also needed to be persuaded of the value of coming sacrifices), the bottom line is still a message like Colonel Blimp's - the world has changed and you have to change too.
The country squire who pours glue into girls' hair is let off the hook because he is a decent conservative cove but he is left alone at the end, ignored even as a petty criminal of sorts. So much Harris 'gets' but the message that there is, in fact, no room for pure traditionalism is, I believe, much more strongly expressed than is implied.
This is not about traditionalists using modern methods in support of traditional values but something quite different - a respect for the junior role of traditional values and skills within an essentially modernist ideology of victory, planning and reconstruction. This is closer by an edge to Soviet support for Uzbek folk dancing than it is to the values of most of the writers and artists outlined in the book.
Artists also have to eat so we have Shell's important patronage of the neo-romantics to consider (and the neo-romantic aspects of the Festival of Britain) in much the same terms - the appropriation of traditionalist memes and images for essentially modernist purposes, reversing at this point the originating thesis of Harris' book which is the appropriation of modernist ideas and techniques to reinvigorate traditional arts (where she is absolutely right in her analysis).
Interestingly the film did not do particularly well critically at the time. It is instructive that, lauded though they are today, neo-romantic ideas did not really reach into popular or even elite culture until after the war and sponsorship by very modern institutions such as advertising agencies and government information operations far from the church and the village artistic community.
This was, however, an important element in the revolt against war socialism that led to the return of a conservative government. Britain had incorporated traditionalist memes and forms but it had no intention of doing anything more than that.
The aggressive nostalgia of Brideshead Revisited and the clever appropriation of rural romanticism by Shell both kick-started a rediscovery of past and country but the 'visitors' are clearly detached - both country and aristocracy are safely tamed for viewing. The modern National Trust visitor dutifully plods through the state rooms of its properties but he or she cannot wait to settle down in the old kitchens with a decent cup of tea and a 'home made' cake.
The modern leisured middle class, whether middle aged, retired or in family mode, communes not with the grand history of dates and family trees but with the invented memory of their own past. Their ancestors were far more likely to have been in service than been a Despenser or a Beckford. The sub-text is that Middle England now owns its own past (through its memberships) even if there are rules as to when you can take tea and when visit.
The monster of aristocratic privilege is tamed, much as Nosferatu becomes a children's cartoon with the passing of sufficient generations. The substance of Britain was already 'modern' in the 1930s let alone the 1950s. The greater the modernisation, the bigger the possibility of a 'safe space' to be allocated for the former monstrous oppressive powers of lords and prelates.
Harris' book is thus particularly important because she outlines all the many 'tools' that were available for the next generation of appropriators seeking a more settled Britain, tools that could be derived from the antiquarian and rural sensibility of the 1930s. The neo-romantic advertisements for Shell were naturally succeeded by the steady saving of country houses for the middle classes to do their 'Downton Abbey' act later while green belts emerged to let ribbon developments breathe.
We must grateful for this yet see it for it what it is - after all, it was often the Left that seemed as keen as anyone to preserve what was left of the past precisely because it contained no threat. It could be captured much like Labour had captured the State itself in 1945. Nevertheless, as the decades passed, a wider conservative traditionalist mentality emerged and became locked into the suburban and small town mentality of the English middle classes.
It might include country Anglicanism (visiting churches rather than services), the National Trust (actually a very efficient and modern organisation), repeated watching of variants of 'Brideshead Revisited' (rediscovered for manufactured nostalgia every two or three decades either directly or through bastardised copies such as 'Downton' and wholly dependent on the very modern medoum of television), English gardening and English cooking.
To many Britons, this neo-romantic idyll is pretty well what England now is outside London(with appropriate regional variants). The book itself starts with a church font and ends with a country house. Everything between these two symbolic artefacts of man seems to be a a gloss on 'modern' responses to a once-dominant Anglican faith and to a lost aristocracy. Perhaps, Harris likes it all a bit too much but that is her privilege. It is all very beautiful in its way even if much of it is fake.
Another bookend is more intellectual, between the cold platonic formalism of Fry and the Bloomsbury set on the one hand and the somewhat deadly idealistic communitarian cultural theory of Leavis. Both thinkers represent all that was dreary in those intellectuals who pontificated from high on what was appropriate and what was not. The irony of contemporary criticism of the Victorians is that many of their critics never broke free of the same fundamentalist judgmentalism.
Harris' reading, however, of Virginia Woolf is particularly interesting because she gives good cause to see her as symbolic of the flow from urban formalism to a more nuanced position. There is further work to be done perhaps on Woolf as psycho-geographer. Somehow, I found it hard to grasp what precisely Harris wanted to say about her but that may be my fault and not hers.
The more radical conservative aspects are also covered in pieces on T S Eliot and Rolf Gardiner and, though modernists who remained modernists tended to the left (albeit a somewhat authoritarian Left), you can see, without making it a rule, the shift into church and community over time of many other significant figures.
But why no mention of Eric Gill? Is it sheer embarrassment at what we know of his sexual proclivities? Yet it is hard not see him as central to the merging of modernist simplicity and Christianity, well in advance others. The silence is all the stranger when we consider the importance placed by Harris on the Midland Hotel in Morecombe and the fact that Spencer gets a mention.
There is also surprisingly limited coverage of the Inklings. They were meeting in and around Oxford precisely duruing the period in question and, though never modernists, they represented an essential bridge to Christian fantasy. Perhaps Tolkien might have been off topic but Charles Williams should not be - his account of a village play at the heart of Descent into Hell should have been grist to Harris' mill.
Perhaps we should not complain that there is no real wider context for the movement such as it was, no sense of how these shifts related to the rise of left-wing responses to European fascism, nor of how it might have been an attempt to construct a uniquely liberal English 'third way' a-political strategy of cultural withdrawal in the context of depression, war and, increasingly, death duties. The neo-romantic impulse, with added modernity, is the nostalgic love affair of the English middle class with a no-longer-threatening aristocracy.
Harris points out Waugh's evident and successful strategy of creating allies in the middle classes against socialism and it is true that, at this point in history, as across Europe, the middle classes were coming to prefer the now weakened conservative devil they knew to the devil of world-changing working class and urban organisation. While one part of British middle class culture was becoming deeply engaged in 'issues' and becoming earnest (Orwell being a good example), this other element was slipping into a sort of anti-decadent 'art for nearly art's sake' (in which religious and rural themes gave meaning as subjects).
This is the turn when old Liberal England (whose political death was quite sudden), which had thought itself the permanent sole rival to conservative England with the organised working classes well in hand, started to realise that the game had changed. Progressive Fabians might have stuck with their alliance with the rising trades unions but most middle class people soon felt threatened by state corporatism. The liberal-minded doctor might have come to be suspicious of the plans for a National Health Service.
A shift from modernism to neo-romanticism in aesthetic terms is precisely that political shift from traditional conservatism towards modern conservatism that was articulated by Stanley Baldwin (PM thre times until 1937) and which now provides the basis for the last gasp of old Etonian leadership in Johnson, Osborne and Cameron today.
Those on the Left are often puzzled that three Old Etonians straight out of Waugh are running one of the two great parties of state (much as Tories are puzzled that two brothers can be rivals in an apparently anti-aristocratic party of the Left!) The fact that it scarcely matters to half of the English is partly explained by this book.
Our Old Etonians are simply reversals of the Disraeli deal - that is, where once the aristocrats hired a middle class guy and gave him a mini-version of their own large country houses, the conservative middle classes hire Old Etonians as ersatz aristocrats to deliver their otherwise broadly liberal prejudices along conservative lines.
A final word of praise for Thames & Hudson. The illustrations are not only apposite and beautifully printed but, in nearly every case, actually relate directly to their references in the text, minimising that bug bear of non-fiction reading - having to abandon the page to go and rummage through a block of illustrations elsewhere.
All in all, an entertaining and well written book which is recommended for anyone interested in English cultural history.
April 9, 2022
This exploration of English culture during the 1930’s and early 1940’s dwells on figures operating in contrast to the prevalent New International Style … from writers such as Virginia Woolf, John Betjeman, Elizabeth Bowen, etc., and artists such as Cecil Beaton and John Piper came a trend of Romanticism … highly eclectic in its survey of the period … includes a useful “Select Bibliography” …
August 1, 2025
Really well written and interesting book on the Modernist movement and the reaction to it in Britain, where the desire to ground the arts in the reality of place and time was very strong, particularly in wartime.
November 22, 2025
I swayed between enjoying this and finding it feel aimless and frustrating while it was traversing simultaneous lives and works. I’m going to go to somewhere mentioned in this on the Somerset levels and really didn’t find parts intriguing but was never enthralled.
April 16, 2020
An engaging book about the attempts, in British art and culture during the 1930s and 1940s, to reconcile the formal experimentation of modernism with the traditions of British life. Harris takes the reader on a journey through art (John Piper features prominently, as do critics like Roger Fry and Cyril Connolly, and the Shell-Mex adverts of the mid-century), literature (Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden), food writing, horticulture, architecture and more. In each case, she investigates the ways that thinkers tried to tap into strains of a specifically British traditions - the village green, the rolling hills, the hedgerows, the parish church, the cloudy weather, the country piles, the gardens - and bring them together with the abstract, geometric, progressive world of modernism.
There's a tremendous amount of food for thought here. The book is very much aimed at the general reader, who will come away from this book with a renewed appreciation for the intellectual journey of a John Betjeman or an Osbert Sitwell. But lurking in the background here throughout, never quite mentioned openly, is, of course, class. Certainly many of these thinkers, and their attempts to carve out a British modernism, seem to revolve entirely around large country mansions, landscaped gardens and other facets of a specific type of English life unavailable to the majority. Indeed, cities, and the (working class) people who live in them barely feature at all in Romantic Moderns, which I think is a shame.
There's a tremendous amount of food for thought here. The book is very much aimed at the general reader, who will come away from this book with a renewed appreciation for the intellectual journey of a John Betjeman or an Osbert Sitwell. But lurking in the background here throughout, never quite mentioned openly, is, of course, class. Certainly many of these thinkers, and their attempts to carve out a British modernism, seem to revolve entirely around large country mansions, landscaped gardens and other facets of a specific type of English life unavailable to the majority. Indeed, cities, and the (working class) people who live in them barely feature at all in Romantic Moderns, which I think is a shame.
June 3, 2016
Interesting account of the modernist wave in England during the 1930s and its clashes and embraces with English romantic conservatism. Alexandra Harris doesn't stop at architecture, literature or painting, she also covers the landscape, the travel industry, food and even the English weather. The rather dry academic style of her book is rather unfortunate.
August 2, 2020
A very enjoyable journey into the Modernist movement in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s, with well developed themes and exploration of the artists and writers who defined it. Very well written and presented, with nice quality illustrations.
November 6, 2010
Charmingly illustrated tour around the parochial backwaters of early twentieth-century British art.
June 8, 2017
In Romantic Moderns Alexandra Harris takes a new approach to Modernism in art and literature as it manifested itself in England. The movement here was not the one of clean lines, white space and daring experiments in novels, drama and poetry that we tend to think of in its continental guise. Those trends were all present in England, but, fertilised by attachments to the past, native landscapes, architecture and flora, and to the Church of England, the results were somewhat different. A softer, 'romantic' modernism developed.
Harris's scope is wide, and her writing engaging and she makes a strong case for her thesis. Virginia Woolf and John Piper are the anchors to which her case is most strongly attached, but she takes in a very wide range of artists, writers, architects, photographers, with fascinating diversions into cookery and garden design.
The book itself is a beautiful object - printed on fine cream paper, bound so that it stays open at any point and fulsomely illustrated.
Harris's scope is wide, and her writing engaging and she makes a strong case for her thesis. Virginia Woolf and John Piper are the anchors to which her case is most strongly attached, but she takes in a very wide range of artists, writers, architects, photographers, with fascinating diversions into cookery and garden design.
The book itself is a beautiful object - printed on fine cream paper, bound so that it stays open at any point and fulsomely illustrated.
September 15, 2017
I have to admit that I'm rather jealous of Alexandra Harris. Not many PhD theses are this readable (mine certainly isn't). Broadly covering British culture between the wars (a great over-simplification), her study is fantastically wide-ranging. Not only does she bridge the literary and visual arts with apparent ease, but she manages to take in music, cookery, and gardening as well. Despite this range, it's remarkably focused. That's in part of because of what it does leave out. This is not a book about mass culture. Its focus is very much on the taste and works of a small group of intellectuals, but these are intellectuals who profoundly impacted British culture more broadly.
It's really something of a masterpiece.
It's really something of a masterpiece.
September 18, 2020
Fascinating account of the reaction of English artists and authors to modernism and how it influenced them even when they appeared to reject it. From John Piper to Virginia Woolf to John Betjeman to Osbert Sitwell the author traces links and themes common to all of them in the 1930s and 40s. This book really acts like a survey of all aspects of English cultural life from art to architecture to gardening and cookery during the interwar years. Beautifully illustrated and an interesting read.
September 13, 2019
I’ve been meaning to read this book for years. It’s a period of history, and cast of characters I’m quite interesting in.
Alexandra Harris writes about the particular strain of English modernism, not gleaming as you might see it on the continent but harking back to earlier times. It covers a wide gamut of topics, all of it put across in a very easy to read style.
Alexandra Harris writes about the particular strain of English modernism, not gleaming as you might see it on the continent but harking back to earlier times. It covers a wide gamut of topics, all of it put across in a very easy to read style.
January 17, 2022
AH was having a moment as a beautiful young academic when she wrote this, so perhaps reviewers and readers cut her more slack than an older writer might have received. The book contains much of interest but it is perhaps a little breathlessly tiggerish.
March 12, 2019
There is much in this book that I admired but it also felt like a romp through 30s and 40s Britain. At times it seemed to be a modernist stream of consciousness.
August 18, 2024
Excited about the concept of `literary geography´ - the relationship between place and art/ literature.
October 7, 2024
A well researched book which is nicely illustrated. It’s reasonably accessible to the lay reader assuming you’ve read a good selection of the featured authors.
November 17, 2024
Another life-changing book for me. If only I'd had this when I was studying Modernism! Love pretty much everyone featured in it.
December 13, 2024
A beautifully written study linking England's relationship with art and literature to the country's mild obesssions of home and the weather. A gem of a book.
November 9, 2021
Romantic Moderns is not a ... guidebook to the period ... this is a book about art and place.
I found this generous and expansive book to be an enlightening supplement to other studies of 1930’s and 1940’s England, complementing them, as it is selective in emphasising the Romantic as avant-garde culture takes a step back from European Modernism, to reconnect with earlier British art.
It therefore provides a wide ranging review of culture in Britain/England from a different perspective. This is not about Auden’s “low dishonest decade”, and knowingly doesn’t concentrate on author’s and artists responses to the political situation, instead highlighting their retreat to Georgian sensibilities or attempts to marry the English landscape tradition with European Modernism.
The book looks at lesser known artists, such as John Piper, Eric Ravilious, Rex Whistler and Cecil Beaton, and refers to the writings of the Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, rather than George Orwell and Christopher Isherwood; Betjeman, as distinguished from Spender and MacNeice.
The book is beautifully written, for example of Henry Green’s novel:
Full of ornament and sensuality, Loving (1945) is, like Brideshead,a butter-book, making up for what is rationed.
As a cultural history, this book is also excellent at highlighting renewed interest in authors and painters of the past, for example in the chapter about village life, the reissues of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selbourne (1789) with contemporary illustrations. The chapter on village life also shows the author’s wide reading of the period, when after referencing Waugh, Orwell and Greene, she mentions in passing two villages of crime fiction (Sayer’s Fenchurch St Paul and Christie’s St Mary Mead).
For me, this is an excellent book to fill out my knowledge of the period, but isn’t appropriate as an introduction.
Beautifully produced and illustrated, as you expect from Thames and Hudson, with endpapers replicating a Tree and Cow wallpaper design of Edward Bawden.
I found this generous and expansive book to be an enlightening supplement to other studies of 1930’s and 1940’s England, complementing them, as it is selective in emphasising the Romantic as avant-garde culture takes a step back from European Modernism, to reconnect with earlier British art.
It therefore provides a wide ranging review of culture in Britain/England from a different perspective. This is not about Auden’s “low dishonest decade”, and knowingly doesn’t concentrate on author’s and artists responses to the political situation, instead highlighting their retreat to Georgian sensibilities or attempts to marry the English landscape tradition with European Modernism.
The book looks at lesser known artists, such as John Piper, Eric Ravilious, Rex Whistler and Cecil Beaton, and refers to the writings of the Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, rather than George Orwell and Christopher Isherwood; Betjeman, as distinguished from Spender and MacNeice.
The book is beautifully written, for example of Henry Green’s novel:
Full of ornament and sensuality, Loving (1945) is, like Brideshead,a butter-book, making up for what is rationed.
As a cultural history, this book is also excellent at highlighting renewed interest in authors and painters of the past, for example in the chapter about village life, the reissues of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selbourne (1789) with contemporary illustrations. The chapter on village life also shows the author’s wide reading of the period, when after referencing Waugh, Orwell and Greene, she mentions in passing two villages of crime fiction (Sayer’s Fenchurch St Paul and Christie’s St Mary Mead).
For me, this is an excellent book to fill out my knowledge of the period, but isn’t appropriate as an introduction.
Beautifully produced and illustrated, as you expect from Thames and Hudson, with endpapers replicating a Tree and Cow wallpaper design of Edward Bawden.
July 16, 2019
This is supremely excellent. Harris discusses so many interesting figures of the 1930s and 1940s, bringing them all into her straightforward argument that there was some middle ground or intermingling between modernism and romantic nostalgia in English art of the time. In doing so, she presents a fabulous insight into the vagaries of taste. For me, it's a strong defence that harking back isn't always stultifying. Art, ideas, and styles of the past get re-appropriated and become something new, as in the case of Harris's closing account of a trip to a country house. When we do this — seeing the paintings, chatting with the volunteers, enjoying the flowers, having a tea — we're not really in the past at all. The entire experience is quite distant from how that house's former owners would have experienced it. Yet, these are special occasions for many of us; no matter how backward-looking on the surface, these days out are, in some sense, totally of our time. I quite like this, and Harris comforted me after presenting me with endless anxiety about change from the people she studies.
May 19, 2012
I really enjoyed this, although it begins to feel a little padded and directionless towards the end. Alexandra Harris excels at substantiating her broad general statements about visual and literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s with the pithy use of contemporary diaries, letters and fiction. She has me utterly convinced of her arguments about neo-romanticism vs modernism and the rise of place as an index of English identity. I felt, at times, that she was making this argument with half an eye to the polemic of it rather than as an objective observer of a trend and I found this a little troubling. But overall refreshingly interdisciplinary and passionate. I'm looking forward to reading her book about Virginia Woolf.
February 23, 2011
This is the sort of book that makes me feel inadequate. Just 30 years old and Alexandra Harris has managed to pull off a book that is immensely readable and enjoyable, yet serious and academic at the same time. She looks at arts and attitudes in the 1930s and 1940s and sets against Modernism (abstract, minimalist, functional) the more prevailing attitudes in England of wanting to have roots, to belong to the land and almost of nostalgia. She looks at poetry, novels, non-fiction writing, architecture, painting, sculpture, garden design, architecture and attitudes and brings them all together. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
October 7, 2016
Excellent and well-researched work covering a lot of ground and drawing many interesting connections. The opening and closing paragraphs (respectively, John Piper's ecstatic encounter with the font at Toller Fratrum and the author's own trip to the Sitwells' Renishaw Hall) are wonderful, and my only regret is that a greater proportion of narrative excerpts such as these would have helped to leaven some of the more abstract and drier academic writing within. But if you have any interest in the inter-war period in British culture and the careers of Piper, Woolf, Betjeman, Ravilious and their fellow travellers, this is an essential work.
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August 22, 2011Can the masterworks of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf be discussed in the same pages as the perfectly delightful but infinitely less significant work of the photographer Cecil Beaton and the graphic artists Rex Whistler and Edward Bawden? I certainly did not believe this could be done well, until I read Alexandra Harris’s new book. There is no question that Romantic Moderns is calculated to please Anglophiles. But Harris, a young English art historian, does not coddle her core audience. my link text">Read more...
July 3, 2014
This was really an interesting essay, which offers a vision of the years ranging from 1939 to 1940 through the figures of various artists, from writers to painters through architects and their works, reinterpreted in from a modernist/romantic point of view.
Veramente un saggio interessante, che propone una lettura degli anni che vanno dal 1939 al 1940 attraverso le figure di vari artisti, dagli scrittori ai pittori passando per gli architetti, e delle loro opere rilette in un'ottica modernista/romantica. Per gli amanti del genere.
Veramente un saggio interessante, che propone una lettura degli anni che vanno dal 1939 al 1940 attraverso le figure di vari artisti, dagli scrittori ai pittori passando per gli architetti, e delle loro opere rilette in un'ottica modernista/romantica. Per gli amanti del genere.
February 16, 2014
Not sure I can give an unbiased review of this book as I was closely involved with the book from a publishing perspective. Let's just say I think Alex Harris is an incredibly talented writer, who makes persuasive arguments in this thoughtful look at why British arts of the first third of the 20th century mattered as much as what was happening on the continent at the same time. Combining art historical and literary criticism with an ease not very often seen, Harris is clearly an author to keep an eye on...
April 11, 2013
hmm this book looks way more interesting than it is.
Harris has an ability to write and has interesting things to say but and i appreciate that this is possibly just me it isnt interesting to me.
The sense of learning and enthusiasm could be infectious is you are of the mood but if you are not its almost a path to whocaresville.
It is the type of book you can dip into but i doubt you would ever swim in it, it can feel turgid but again i wonder if that is just me.
January 31, 2025
This was our January book club book! It was a great read but It assumes the reader has significant prior knowledge about the interwar period of European/British art. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy a read it was. If you are looking to expand your understanding of what helped form the British identity then this is a great place to start.
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