Author: Diana Newby

Telling “the widest story”: A Review of Inventing Tomorrow Diana Rose Newby British modernism, as with other movements of its kind, defined itself as much by what it wasn’t as by what it was. Take Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay-cum-manifesto “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924), which heralded a new class of writing attentive to the real “depths” of character over and against the flatness of Edwardian fiction, with its casts of “soulless bodies … cumbering our tables and clogging our minds.” Among the writers she charged with the crime of vitiating literature’s “character-making power” was H. G. Wells. For...