According to Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell exerts a curious force over criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. Integral to accounts of the era's literature, he is nonetheless treated as a “solitary genius” outside its dominant movements and circles (2). Bluemel seeks to alter this view by considering a loose group of writers that coalesced around Orwell in interwar London. Indeed, despite his marquee status, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics foregrounds his less-celebrated cohorts: suburban writer Stevie Smith, Indian-born Anglophone novelist Mulk Raj Anand, and the virtually unknown socialite-turned-socialist Inez Holden. Reading them as “peers” rather than “mere satellites” of Orwell (7), Bluemel hopes to widen the era's canon and undermine the myth of Orwell's solitary genius. To that end, she introduces the unifying heuristic of “intermodernism.” Less a period than “a kind of writing” (6)—and an interpretive lens for reading it—intermodernism joins categories usually divided by the era's critics: the thirties and the forties, realism and modernism, and war and postwar literature.

Bluemel's introduction establishes thematic correspondences and biographical links among Smith, Anand, Holden, and Orwell, while the chapter-length case studies of each author, which comprise the bulk of her study, are wide-ranging in focus. Bluemel defends Smith against charges of anti-Semitism, for example, by attending to her portrayal of a suburban environment snubbed by most modernists. Bluemel suggests that intellectual disdain for the suburbs paralleled English anti-Semitism and that Smith championed suburbia's ordinary Englishness while coyly subverting its latent fascism. In Anand's 1940s nonfiction, Bluemel finds a more articulate stance on Indian independence than in his famous early novels—yet one that alienated his anti-imperialist comrades Orwell and Leonard Woolf, and thereby undermined Anand's legacy. Holden, Bluemel's clear favorite of the group, transformed from a bright young thing and Harper’s contributor to a committed socialist, perfecting thirties documentary techniques to depict wartime work conditions, particularly for female factory hands. And in her most sharply argued chapter, Bluemel links Orwell's reticence regarding the Holocaust to his anxieties about India. Arguing that his writing often shifts attention from Jews to British colonizers, Bluemel claims that Orwell saw in the new Israel signs of recurring imperial domination. For Bluemel, what unites these otherwise diverse issues and writers is a shared intermodernist sensibility based on a “recognizably realist tradition” (5), an affiliation with the working and lower middle classes, and a radical eccentricity that eschewed modernist stridency yet challenged orthodoxies of all aesthetic and political stripes.

Bluemel offers an insightful frame for reassessing thirties and forties literature, situating Orwell alongside undervalued writers who receive her admirably detailed and enthusiastic attention. For readers new to Smith, Anand, and Holden, Bluemel's case studies will provide helpful overviews, discussing an impressive array of each author's works with a rich mix of biographical and historical context. But the admirable breadth of Bluemel's individual chapters sometimes comes at the expense of their argumentative coherence. While Bluemel makes a forceful case against anti-Semitism in Smith, for example, one wonders how Smith's late celebration of suburbia's “authentic, traditional” Englishness (65) differs from the intimations of suburban fascism she exposes in her early work. Clarifying this distinction seems all the more essential given Smith's steady loss of her Jewish friends—which Bluemel discusses at length—and her shift away from depicting Jews in her later work.

Greater coherence between Bluemel's individual chapters would also benefit her study, particularly via a fuller articulation of intermodernism. This concept shares some historical and literary parallels with what Tyrus Miller's Late Modernism (1999) and Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island (2003) theorize, in different ways, as an aesthetic of late modernism. Bluemel, however, frames her concept in less substantial and persuasive terms. Much more deserves to be said about the historical conditions, ideological contours, and stylistic subtleties of intermodernism as variously reflected in work by Smith, Anand, Holden, and Orwell. Of course, Bluemel intends intermodernism to be a flexible category, and given the marked differences between her authors, she rightly avoids constraining herself with an overly rigid definition. Yet while emphasizing intermodernism's value as an aesthetic (rather than periodizing) category, she says little about differences of style and form in her authors’ work. It is not that Bluemel ignores issues of language; indeed, some of her most fascinating passages detail her authors’ linguistic experiments and arguments (Holden rewrote her previously published short fiction to accord with C. K. Ogden's Basic English, while Anand advocated English language and literature as a means of consolidating Indian national identity). Yet Bluemel generally pays little heed to the rhythms and textures of these authors’ works, which—as in the case of Smith and Anand—can be worlds apart. Proving intermodernism's explanatory value demands more than this.

In addition, like Miller's and Esty's notions of late modernism, Bluemel's intermodernism refines a falsely monolithic category—modernism—even as it reinforces that category's dominance over the era. Bluemel claims that Smith, Anand, Holden, and Orwell contributed to the flourishing of “non-modernist texts” and “non-modernist cultural activity” during the thirties and forties (4), but her organizing concept of intermodernism threatens to undermine the exceptional and singular qualities she values in these writers. (Ironically, in her defense of Anand's writing, Bluemel lodges a similar accusation against postcolonial critics, whom she chastises for reducing literary nuance to political discourse.) Though Bluemel implores us to examine the “spaces between and within modernisms” (6)—a refrain that echoes throughout her study (e.g., 51, 61, 171, 178)—intermodernism oddly bolsters an aesthetic hegemony that her radical eccentrics in many ways opposed.

Consequently, readers may wish that, rather than the meticulous attention she devotes to biographical detail, Bluemel had synthesized her varied authors and issues into a more coherent discussion of intermodernism. But given the compelling material Bluemel brings to light, and the importance of complicating outdated literary frameworks—of the thirties and forties, and of early twentieth century literature more generally—George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics is a welcome addition to scholarship of the period.