Pamela Fletcher's Narrating Modernity considers a little-known category of late-Victorian–early-Edwardian painting named in its time “the problem picture” and its place in the development of modern aesthetics in Britain. In their heyday at the Royal Academy in the first decade of the twentieth century, problem pictures addressed popular social issues and often depicted subjects at a point of crisis or discovery such as marital infidelity, parent-child conflict, or imminent death. A major aspect of their appeal was the more detailed narrative puzzle they offered the spectator-reviewer who wrote revealing responses to such puzzles.

The book considers especially the emblematic work of John Collier and examines the problem picture as a historical and aesthetic bridge between two types of painting, each considered modern in its day: Victorian narrative paintings (which problem pictures often referenced) and British formalist modernism articulated by Roger Fry and Clive Bell (who lamented the problem picture as the antithesis of good, modern art). We learn how the rise and popularization of this form of fine art lead inevitably to its commodification and perceived demise. In keeping with current scholarly issue formation, Fletcher considers how the problem picture worked within a complex set of cultural and ideological practices centering on gender and class.

For example, in The Cheat (1905), which Fletcher calls perhaps Collier's most popular work, two wealthy couples dressed in evening wear are placed around a card table. One of the women dramatically stands either to accuse her female friend of cheating at the game or else to defend herself against the same charge; observers pondered which it was. Fletcher seeks to uncover “what was at stake” (78) in such a painting and its spirited responses—a way of naming the intrigue of these pictures for herself as writer throughout the entire book. She concludes that one anxiety about gender that The Cheat reflects is whether women's “nature” allowed her to be trustworthy or competent in matters of money, as women around 1905 managed their family's finances at home or in the workplace—but not without social tensions. An anxiety about class that the painting suggests is whether gambling at bridge—one of the habits of the rich increasingly mimicked by the middle classes—might infiltrate the frugal and practical bourgeois home. This kind of probing of the art's appeal lies at the heart of the success of Fletcher's careful research.

One strength of the book is Fletcher's skillful use of a wide range of supplemental texts to inform the paintings. She has a command of the contemporaneous plays of Henrik Ibsen, journalistic accounts worrying about “The New Woman” and divorce reform (Collier was a feminist and supporter of divorce reform), advertising messages and techniques, and even detective novels, and she brings these modern texts to bear in understanding problem pictures and their appeal.

Fletcher is at her best when she has presented the foundational material and allows herself to make new linkages, as between the viewer's psychological dynamic with the problem picture and with new forms of advertising. In each case, she surmises, its appeal is grounded in the creation of a desire that can never be completely fulfilled, one more aptly pitched to new female consumers of art and commercial products. This insight reflects a new application of ideas borrowed from a range of thinkers from Raymond Williams to Andreas Huyssen to Tania Modleski, all of whom she cites in her bibliography.

Indeed, the bibliography confirms that Fletcher's own approach has been to synthesize critical theory with art history, drawing on the discipline's empiricist roots but also inflected by feminist and poststructuralist thinkers inside and outside the discipline who have contributed to the valorizing of the contingent and the ambivalent. (At points Fletcher's study recalls some of the most trenchant critical analysis of popular cultural forms such as television or women's romance novels.) The result is a chronological study that adeptly maneuvers though much material to achieve nuanced readings of problem pictures and supplemental popular cultural texts.

The book tends toward repetition, especially where chapter and section conclusions are instead merely pro forma summaries. Her case is thoroughly convincing for the problem picture as a self-consciously multivalent genre that problematizes narrativity. But following through on the implications of some of the critical theory she utilizes about indeterminacy and multivalence, the book could benefit from more acknowledgment that ambiguity or open-ended narrative is not limited to the end-of-the-century problem pictures but characterizes many Victorian narrative pictures as well. She is more successful when she cites specific paintings as intertextual references (how, e.g., Collier's 1908 Sentence of Death, which she analyzes in such fascinating detail, suggests Luke Fildes's 1891 The Doctor), and less convincing when she generalizes broadly about the earlier genre that may not be so homogeneous.

Fletcher concludes that the problem picture was the victim of its own success and that it fell out of favor as viewers learned a new set of expectations for modern art—that it draw on the viewer's emotion and imagination while eschewing his (but mostly her) puzzle-solving ingenuity. Indeed, the problem picture's denouement was hastened by its firmer association with a lower middle-class suburban female audience thought to have poor aesthetic taste.

Art historical studies on turn-of-the-century Britain have been refreshed by Fletcher's thoughtful, theoretically sophisticated study, one presented in clear and accessible language.