To secure a license from the examiner of plays, George Bernard Shaw refashioned the protagonist of Mrs. Warren's Profession from a prostitute to a shoplifter. While Shaw would later assail professional puritans for their ignorance and “sectarian bigotry” (65), his work avoided explicit engagement with forbidden topics. Similarly, Virginia Woolf censored herself even as she mocked the censoring impulse. In one case she expunged from a manuscript repeated references to “copulation” (109) and an allusion to cats having sex. James Joyce, who assumed a posture of indifference toward censorship, strategized lines of defense for his novels, encouraging proxies to campaign on their behalf. One way or another, celebrated figures of British modernism emerge from Celia Marshik's important book less heroic and even compliant with the dictates of the public morality movement and its powerful allies in government, the courts, and the press.

Literary historians, who focused on a few famous obscenity trials, have overlooked the extent to which self-anointed and official censors intimidated (and enraged) British authors as late as the 1930s. In contrast, Marshik's nuanced analysis draws on diverse sources including manuscripts, letters, diary entries, and archival material from police and government offices. In addition to the three aforementioned literary icons, British Modernism and Censorship dedicates chapters to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the early career of Jean Rhys. Rossetti's personal travails, following the publication of his erotic poems Jenny and Nuptial Sleep, offered a cautionary tale for modernists who would embrace his advocacy for exploring taboo topics, such as prostitution, from the sympathetic “inner standing-point” (39) of Art.

Long after the supposed decline and fall of intrusive Victorianism, state officials monitored the private lives of writers and diligently scrutinized their writing. Government was prodded by a belligerent movement (epitomized by the National Vigilance Association) invigorated by recurrent “white slavery” panics. Purity drives later turned from brothels to “amateur” prostitution coloring other forms of nonmarital sex deviant. The Obscene Publication (Campbell) Act of 1857 and the watershed 1868 Hicklin judgment equipped prosecutors with sharper legal claws. Whereas prosecution was contestable, censorial practices of bodies such as the powerful Circulating Libraries Association remained largely hidden from public view.

Marshik's main contention, however, is that much beyond repression, the specter of censorship left complex and even positive imprints on British literature. Modernism in fact “owes many of its trademark aesthetic qualities—such as self-reflexivity, fragmentation, and indirection—to censorship” (6). Authors carefully courted after their audiences, disarming their resistance by applying self-restraint and, conversely, using satire and mime to stage censorship as an object of scorn and fun. The “censorship dialectic” (3) thus contributed to the suffusion of modernist literature with irony, a trait previously linked to other catalysts, especially the trauma of the Great War. Restrictions and harassment also prompted writers to articulate their aesthetic credos, either by unleashing characters and voices in their drama, poetry, and prose or by producing overt literary manifestos. Countercensorship campaigns consequently foregrounded the author's intentions in the consideration of a literary text, while the antiobscenity rationale prescribed evaluating art according to its effects on readers. Modernist aesthetic ideologies partook in policing the boundaries between legitimate art and lurid literature.

Censorship allowed writers to construct a public persona of the martyr, the enfant terrible, or the crusader for freedom of expression. It assisted them in becoming modern. Authors phrased public appeals, signed petitions, and testified in court and in Parliament. Marshik defends the modernists from the charge of depoliticizing art, arguing that through the censorship battles modern literature turned polemical, antiauthoritarian, and even didactic, deploying a rather subtle “reverse pedagogy” (7). Nevertheless, as unstable modes of social critique, satire and irony often rendered literary texts complicit with their targets of derision. Thus, in her first four novels Rhys satirized the purity movement offering an ironic mime of massage-house panics. In doing so, however, she borrowed the plotline of the fallen woman's “downward path” and accepted the notion that books can indeed corrupt the innocent.

Another example of the often undetected role of censorship is Shaw's Pygmalion's ambiguous affinity with William T. Stead's “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885). In this antivice classic, Stead described himself purchasing a girl for five pounds. Shaw pokes fun at moralizing fearmongers, but his drama, especially its stage performances, could be easily perceived to support major tenets of the purity movement. Even Joyce's Ulysses, which more than other novels undermined the virtue/vice binary, “is supersaturated with ideologies in which it expresses disbelief” (150).

Authors negotiated their ways through the censorship dialectic somewhat differently. Joyce defiantly enhanced his books’ sexual excess and further reworked their plots to highlight their aesthetic scheme. Rhys had the double misfortune of having her work deemed sordid and therefore barred from libraries and, in contrast, of not being subjected to publicity-inducing official prosecution. Exposing the gendered workings of censorship in the careers of Woolf and Rhys is among Marshik's achievements. For female authors, writing about prostitutes was particularly risky. Regardless of the author's gender, the literary preoccupation with prostitution is a predominant theme in British Modernism and Censorship. The figure of the prostitute appealed to modernists as a social outsider, but their attention was also an ambivalent response to the purity movement's own coupling of “white slavery” and literature. Marshik's focus on prostitution endows her book with great coherence but may also be a limiting factor by occluding other dynamics in the struggles over the representation of sexuality.

British Modernism and Censorship is compelling, well written, and of interest to both literary critics and historians. Marshik does not say much about the censorship part of the censorship dialectic, however. How was censorship shaped by modernism (outside its ultimate demise)? Why was it relatively easy for the British state eventually to decolonize the literary field? How was official censorship different from other tensions between authors and their audiences? Marshik's historical approach is persuasive. Yet, her topic is open to other strategies of historicization that, for instance, would highlight discourse (e.g., sexuality, deviancy, taboo) and its diverse historical manifestations over the focus on the ostensible interplay between authorial subjectivities—whether transgressive or self-censoring—and external pressures.