The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature

• Published in: English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 1880-1920, 2018, Vol.61 (4), p.536-542
• Main Author: Bachman, Maria K
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; American literature; British & Irish literature; Cather, Willa (1873-1947); Creativity; Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965); English literature; Fitzgerald, F Scott (1896-1940); Forster, E M (1879-1970); Joyce, James (1882-1941); Lawrence, D H (1885-1930); Lewis, Harry Sinclair (1885-1951); Literary history; Literature; Mental depression; Modernism; Novels; Pound, Ezra (1885-1972); Toomer, Jean (1894-1967); Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941); Year in review
• ISSN: 0013-8339

Notably, his attention to the minutiae of their personal dramas brings to light less familiar aspects of these "four legendary writers" as he spotlights how they grappled with creative self-doubt and artistic inertia, chronic illness, neurosis, depression, and unrequited love and loss. Having laid the biographical groundwork for each writer's creative crisis, Goldstein spends the rest of the book chronicling the fits and starts of their writing-exploring the sometimes fascinating, sometimes prosaic details of their professional jealousies, financial worries, and publishing wrangles, as well as their contemporary anxieties of influence, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. [...]an essential missing component to Goldstein's narrative is the insider's account of how these writers actually "conspired to make the modern happen." [...]the peripatetic Lawrence would write a semi-autobiographical and rather forgettable novel, Kangaroo (1923).