Modernism and the Aristocracy employs literary, philosophical, and historical methods to scrutinize the many forms in which aristocratic figures appear in the interwar novel, that most middle-class genre of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Parkes’s account retraces the lineaments of a familiar story in the historical scholarship: the decline of the British aristocracy. His interpretation, however, uses the historical fate of the aristocracy as a point of departure, looking to modernist novelists’ (and to a lesser extent, poets’) engagement with aristocracy as a means of remaking the aristocracy through fiction. He lays out his method in the introduction: “the present book explores the literary consequences of modernism’s fascination with aristocracy by combining broad intellectual enquiry with close attention to the verbal textures and formal structures of modern texts” (15). Subsequent chapters provide close readings of novels by several modernist British and American authors, readings shaped by attention to philosophical treatments of the emotions evoked by aristocracy as well as to the historical context of class in interwar Britain.

Central to Parkes’s method is attention to the affective influence of aristocracy on modernist texts. The argument of Modernism and the Aristocracy proceeds by delineating those emotional aspects of aristocracy scrutinized by modernist novelists in the interwar period. Chapter 1, “Hierarchies of Idiocy: Stupidity and Intelligence,” posits novels by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley as critiques of both hereditary and intellectual aristocrats, whose limitations, they believed, contributed to the inadequacies of democracy when addressing the challenges of fascism and communism. Chapter 2, “The Noble Style: Aristocratic Boredom,” uses novels by Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh to locate boredom as a key aspect of aristocratic identity in the years between world wars. Chapter 3, “Aches, Howls, and Holes: Country-House Nostalgia,” puts the country house at the center of modernist preoccupation with nostalgia for the aristocracy’s primacy. Chapter 4, “Hieroglyphic Worlds: Transatlantic Sophistication,” mines novels by Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald to interrogate where, and under what circumstances, Americans can attain aristocratic status. Chapter 5, “Capricious Benevolence: Kindness and Cruelty,” revisits the work of Ford, Lawrence, Waugh, and Bowen to explore how aristocratic kindness could generate, and even function as, cruelty, in some cases. The coda, “Monsters After Modernism,” draws a direct line from early twentieth-century modernist preoccupations with the aristocracy to the work of Kazuo Ishiguro and the Patrick Melrose novels of Edward St. Aubyn.

A book this rich in close readings is difficult to explicate in a short review. A closer look at chapter 3, however, illuminates Parkes’s broader approach. Drawing upon philosopher Barbara Cassin’s definition of nostalgia as “the pain of return” (113), Parkes juxtaposes works by Rebecca West, Ford Maddox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Vita Sackville-West, and T.S. Eliot, with an eye towards how the formal properties of novels/poems by each author contribute to either a reimagined country-house tradition, or its demise. Perhaps the most compelling reading Parkes performs in this chapter is that of Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy [Some Do Not … (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928)], which masterfully demonstrates the intertwining of form and affect in the novels. Ford’s use of ellipsis, Parkes argues, “indicates a more formal disposition toward fragmentation, one that invites meta-textual reflection on what it means to write, not only a war novel, but also a country-house novel in the post war period” (160). He goes on to argue that “Ford poses the question of how long the scaled-down middle-class alternative to country-house life can last, and of to what extent, if at all, it will sponsor nostalgic dreaming” (167).

For historians of the British aristocracy, Modernism and the Aristocracy offers much. Through close readings of a wide range of novels—including many lesser-known works—by major British and American writers, Parkes positions the aristocracy at the center of modernist concerns with class and democracy in the interwar period. His account also draws attention to the varied and sometimes confusing terminology of aristocracy in the early twentieth century. The introduction to Modernism and the Aristocracy engages with the historical scholarship on the declining fortunes of the aristocracy in the early twentieth century, drawing upon the work of scholars such as David Cannadine, Ross McKibbin, Lawrence Stone, and J.V. Beckett, as well as that of Noel Annan, who coined the phrase “intellectual aristocracy” in 1955. That latter understanding of aristocracy, as “the best and the brightest,” undergirds the work of certain of Parkes’s modernists here, particularly D.H. Lawrence. In some respects, Lawrence is the outlier as he seems to understand “aristocracy” as a Platonic Form, transcending place and time. The other novelists examined here engaged, to varying degrees with aspects of the demographic grouping we call the aristocracy; Parkes’s insights into the emotions that class evoked in interwar Britain is a welcome intervention.