The title of this book makes no sense. We have here a fragmented sort of biography of two or three years in the life of four authors: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot. The years 1921-1923 are chosen because each of these authors produced something in those years that greatly advanced the art of literature: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Forster’s A Passage to India, Lawrence’s Women in Love, and Eliot’s The Waste Land. 

All four writers knew and socialized with one another. In one way or another, they all struggled with the literature being born around this time. But they were not the first of the new literary wave; Marcel Proust (in French) and James Joyce (in English) preceded them (their literature, but not their biographies, is discussed and heavily influential), which is one reason the book’s title and theme seem a little off target to me.  

Goldstein shifts back and forth between each writer, narrating their individual struggles along with their relationship to one another, other authors, publishers, social luminaries (Ottoline Morrel, whom I’ve encountered in other books about the art of this period, is mentioned many times), and the political and legal machinations of censors, the last in particular with regard to Lawrence.

Goldstein tells the story well. I appreciate knowing something of the history of this literature (I’ve read all but Eliot). I also know now why I will never write a literary masterpiece: all four of these authors were really screwed up psychologically, both internally and by external forces. Life is stressful; nobody is without problems. But as a writer, I am too normal to have the gravitas needed for greatness. So much the pity.