In this deftly argued addition to the Palgrave ‘transitions’ series it is the shadow of Walter Pater which Ruth Robbins discerns falling across the cultural landscape. Robbins’s clearly postulated and lively study begins by demonstrating the origins of modernism in late nineteenth-century aesthetics, but she is also properly alert to the social and political elements which contributed to the literary scene at this juncture. In particular, Robbins pays due attention to the ‘persistence of realism’ and, in the light of Virginia Woolf’s denigratory critique, she makes an admirable case for a reconsideration of Arnold Bennett’s masterly fictional achievement. As regards the cross-currents in the poetry of her chosen time-span, Robbins perceptively sketches the emergence from the Tennysonian influence towards the turn of the century, and here and elsewhere in the book she places particular stress upon women’s writing. The ambivalently representative figure of Oscar Wilde is given its due, and Robbins offers a sharp analysis of The Importance of Being Earnest as an exercise in non-referentiality. The countervailing anti-aesthetic cult of empire writing is considered in a nicely focused reading of manliness, the Gothic and the discourse of degeneration (though we may now wish to impose a moratorium on further critical analysis of Dracula).

Robbins is a sure-footed guide to the New Woman debate and its attendant fiction, and justly gives prominence to Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, whilst also attentive to the sometimes contradictory work of Sarah Grand, George Egerton and others, and she nicely places Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Forster’s Howards End as texts which inherit and reinflect some of these feminist issues (though she is a little deaf to the Carpenterian resonance of Ursula’s final utopian vision). Overall, Pater to Forster is an excellently conceived guide to a crucial literary moment, a text which one could confidently recommend to students of the period, and which is characterised throughout by its sprightly and witty tone. In a work of this type there are inevitable lacunae, and in particular one notes the absence of two highly significant strands of the Edwardian literary scene – the literature of the supernatural (Machen, Blackwood, M.R.James), and the tradition of nature-writing (W.H. Hudson, the Dymock poets, Mary Webb et al). That said, Ruth Robbins here provides a reliable and lucidly argued map of this fascinating literary territory, and one which deserves the widest circulation.

Roger Ebbatson (Loughborough University)

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