One thing is incontrovertible: the skill with which this author handles words. Her book never deserts the high ground, yet is consistently engaging. The writing is full of sap, spry, pithy, insightful, and often exhilarating. Harris moves with great flair across literature, art, architecture, pausing, amid the thirteen chapters, to deliver two entertaining interludes, one on food and the other on gardening. It is a book that bears witness to considerable learning and a nice poise of mind, blending intellect, feeling, humour, and an earthy common sense.

Behind the imaginative reclaiming of England in the 1930s lay mixed motives. One significant driver was the reaction against high modernism. Near the start of this book, Harris, after quoting Virginia Woolf’s comical description in Orlando of a Victorian house – all glass cases, artificial flowers, pianofortes, drawing-room ballads and knick-knacks – briskly opines that ‘the determined exit from the parlour became one of modernism’s great works’.  But the streamlining of furniture, the reduction of the home to a ‘machine for living in’, in Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, or the extreme asceticism that was for many decades regarded as the epitome of good taste,  dismayed many of this book’s protagonists. In 1931 the novelist John Hampson worried that the modern kitchen was in danger of becoming ‘a mere cubby-hole for the opening of tins’. By the end of that decade, with the approach and onset of war, modernism, certainly in art and architecture, seemed to leave many aspects of the human psyche unsatisfied. Hence John Piper’s decision, as an artist, to turn his back on the imperatives of international modernism, to abandon abstraction, and to paint instead architectural scenes and landscapes that, once again, let in the past, history, memory, weather, decay, and a sense of place. It was a form of ‘coming home’, this book’s central theme.

Admittedly this cultural shift, though rural and often local in outlook, is not easily categorised, for it took many forms. The first intimations of it appeared in the 1920s. These included a sudden surge of enthusiasm for the writings of the great naturalist Gilbert White, and for the tiny intricate wood-engravings, full of nature’s particularities, made by Thomas Bewick in the late eighteenth century. Both became role models for Harris’s romantic moderns, who wanted to revive native traditions, but in modern terms. Some, however, went out of their way to help raise public awareness of the merits of Georgian architecture. This, at a time when Georgian churches and country houses were being allowed to fall into ruin, for their style was felt to be too foreign, not part of the national heritage, unlike the Gothic church or the crooked, half-timbered manor.

The fountain at Castle Howard, Yorkshire

To add to the aesthetic confusion of this period, the 1930s also saw a revival of interest in Victorian art, architecture, and design. Its use of heightened detail, search for strangeness, and love of anecdote suddenly made the nineteenth century a rich hunting ground for the British surrealists. At such moments, it must have seemed as if the usual barriers that separate one period from another had lifted, permitting artists and writers to travel imaginatively back and forth across the centuries.

John Piper, like other British artists such as Paul Nash, Henry Moore, and Eric Ravilious, looked back to Saxon and Norman times, and even to prehistoric sites, for inspiration, while also finding meaningful possibilities for modern art in aerial photography. Once war began, the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant began painting murals in a Sussex church. Here English Post-Impressionism mixes with a reminiscence of Italian frescoes from the Renaissance period, as well as consciousness of place and time. Similarly, Virginia Woolf, when writing her last novel, Between the Acts, drew on all kinds of cultural nuggets: fragments of poems, snippets of conversation, catalogues of local names, as well as national and local history. Between the Acts is often said to be a novel about disintegration. Harris holds the contrary view that it is concerned with ‘what holds us together’. Much of its appeal lies in its celebration of the countryside and its customs, offset at moments by the interruptions from nearby – war, aerodromes, rural development. ‘On this single day all the past seems to have risen to the surface and to be consciously felt in the present.’ Harris’s summary brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s phrase ‘the contemporaneity of the past’, used by him to describe Kipling’s Sussex landscape, though it also conveys what he wanted to evoke in his own Four Quartets.

‘Modern society needs bits and pieces of the past.’ It’s a nicely low-key remark but, in the context of this book, it is Harris’s emphatic riposte to modernism’s white walls and flat surfaces. She ends with a moving appreciation of ‘the imaginary architecture of home’ that surfaces in Four Quartets, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited,Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court, Henry Green’s Pack my Bag, and Osbert Sitwell’s five-volume autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand – all books that were written in an attempt to make sense of difficult times. This theme affirms the sense of purposeful continuity running through Romantic Moderns. Harris’s deft weaving together of a large cast of individuals and disparate projects has solidified an aspect of cultural history that has previously seemed motley and disconnected. Its humane legacy has yet to be assessed, but it is certainly far-reaching. Nor is it absurd to suppose that the fountain at Castle Howard, imported from Italy and which inspired Brideshead Revisited, still seems to visitors as it did to Charles Ryder: as if ‘the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was a life-giving spring’.