Late modernism suffers from pedagogical and critical neglect. It is The Waste Land that is consistently anthologized, not Four Quartets. The annus mirabilis of literary modernism remains 1922, World War I its definitive conflict. Although many modernist writers wrote and published during and after the Second World War, modernist studies has been more interested in the beginnings of the movement than in its endings.

Marina MacKay's book redirects our attention to the British modernist texts that emerged out of the later conflict. She suggests that examining modernism through the lens of World War II results in a very different kind of movement, one characterized by “political impurity” (14)—consensus, instead of oppositional, politics—and proximity to centers of political power (12–13). Instead of alienated or isolated, this modernism is public. Moreover, “the war was experienced through aesthetic habits which were familiar from the 1920s [and] that found their political realisation when modernism reached middle age twenty years later” (17).

At its best, MacKay's study illuminates the “guilty compromise” (10) in British modernism's politics as invasion by the Nazis seemed increasingly likely. Throughout the book, MacKay positions modernist novels, essays, and poetry in the context of contemporary discourses that render the politics of individual works surprising. For example, MacKay points out that Blake's Milton, a text that Virginia Woolf quotes to pacifist purposes in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940), was better known to a British audience as the hymn “Jerusalem,” a patriotic anthem of sorts during the Great War. Woolf's pacifist borrowing of Blake's words thus “illustrates how the same cultural property can be used to motivate both patriotic sentiment and progressive good deeds” (26). Other chapters illustrate how blurry the line between these two ends became during the war. In a particularly informative chapter on Four Quartets, MacKay reads Eliot's long poem alongside shorter propaganda pieces Eliot produced during the war. This strategy results in enlightening local readings, but more important, it allows MacKay to argue that Four Quartets performed hitherto ignored “ideological work” against U.S. neutrality (87). And it is this kind of neutrality—and the policies of appeasement that European governments initially pursued in relationship to Nazi Germany—that MacKay's book shows modernism exposed and often critiqued. The novels of Henry Green, for example, consistently associate political neutrality with a “high artistic disinterestedness” (116), but Nazi atrocities made pacifism and neutrality morally untenable. As MacKay writes, “Appalling consequences followed from the refusal to be swept up again in the anti-German fantasies that the government and the popular press had encouraged in the Great War” (113). In the end, Green's politics of “disaffected mannerism” collapsed (19), in large part because the postwar state's vision of equality was a paradoxical victory for literary modernism. If modernism's values were “culturally vindicated,” the victory became Pyrrhic “when the prevailing political climate [grew] decreasingly sympathetic to the economic, social and cultural privilege underpinning modernism's literary triumph” (20). Ironically, then, MacKay's study traces a movement that helped create a new world that had no place for the kind of individuals who had imagined it into existence.

While MacKay's study does the important work of complicating visions of British modernism's politics as consistently oppositional, the argument avoids or dismisses texts that would contradict MacKay's thesis. MacKay argues that Woolf's Between the Acts locates the writer on “conservative territory” (37), but she can make this claim only by disparaging, and largely ignoring, the feminist antiwar polemic Three Guineas (1938). MacKay argues that “praise for the radicalism of Three Guineas should probably be tempered by the recollection that … it conflates two surely incommensurable forms of violence” (29), thus implying that logical flaws MacKay sees in the work—Woolf's limited understanding of the Nazis in 1938—were superseded by the informed perspective of Between the Acts. The problem with this argument, however, is that Woolf was informed about the Nazi threat earlier than most of her contemporaries were. Woolf and her Jewish husband motored through Germany in 1935, a journey made possible in part by a diplomatic letter that let Leonard Woolf travel unmolested. While Three Guineas would doubtless look different if Woolf had written it after, instead of before, Kristallnacht and the concentration camps, Woolf's explicitly oppositional polemic cannot be dismissed with the suggestion that Woolf “came to recognize a little belatedly … that what Britain's patriarchal institutions did to middle-class women was not equivalent to what the Nazis were doing to the Jews” (29). This caricature of the essay's argument obscures continuities between Three Guineas and Between the Acts; indeed, the politics of the latter look a great deal less conservative if one reads Miss La Trobe, the creator of the novel's pageant, as a fictional exemplar of Three Guineas's Outsiders’ Society. MacKay's reluctance to take Three Guineas seriously might seem a local issue, but she similarly sidesteps other texts with oppositional politics. W. H. Auden's “September 1, 1939,” which blames the Treaty of Versailles for German aggression, with the lines “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return,” is dismissed as indulging in “vulgarised … causality” (60). MacKay's disdain for Auden's logic makes it seem that the poem does not merit full consideration. Nevertheless, her brief reference to “September 1, 1939” reminds readers that there are many works that cannot be subsumed into the centrist politics with which Modernism and World War II is interested.

If such passages lead readers to argue with MacKay, her book nevertheless performs valuable work in encouraging scholars to reevaluate what we thought we knew about the politics of British modernism. Late modernism, as MacKay demonstrates, often found itself in accord with “a world that it anticipated and helped to make possible” (156). This complicates the dominant picture of an oppositional modernism, but it also makes modernism successful and important in ways that we can all appreciate.