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

Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times books website, offers an extensively annotated account of how four major authors invented modernism in 1922. Already a literary landmark for the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and the first appearance of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in English, 1922 is staked out by Goldstein as a “crucial year of change and outstanding creative renaissance” for his principals. Lawrence’s Women in Love survived an obscenity lawsuit, Forster revived his career with A Passage to India, Eliot published The Waste Land to wide acclaim, and Woolf invented Mrs. Dalloway’s inner world. For context, Goldstein dwells at length, and with frequent repetition, on his writers’ challenges, disappointments, and jealousies. Lawrence whirls like a dervish over countries and continents, happy nowhere; Forster broods with loneliness and grief; Eliot waffles over his great poem in between rest cures; and Woolf battles illness and her own inclination toward elegant spite. Goldstein’s plentiful digressions threaten to disjoint an already fragile narrative thread. Nonetheless, the intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story about how great literature is made, and will please scholars and hardcore fans alike. [em]Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (July) [/em]