Identifying fundamental changes in romance and love in twentieth-century Britain is a potentially difficult task, in part because, as Claire Langhamer writes in her afterword to this volume, “love has a history—and yet the precise contours of that history shift according to whose experiences and which sources we foreground” (245). To overcome this difficulty and resist the tendency to allow the perspective of one religion, gender, generation, or class to speak, even implicitly, for the whole, each chapter of this volume foregrounds a different aspect of love and romance in the years between the end of the First World War and the onset of second-wave feminism. The range of topics covered provides a broad base to support more generalized claims, especially those related to marriage. Marriage as an institution, as stressed in the introduction and the final chapter, was never so widespread in British society as it was in these decades, and running throughout the volume is an effort to explain the social, cultural, and institutional factors that made marriage so popular in this period, as well as the emotional consequences of this for individuals and within communities.

Most of the chapters employ similar methodologies and are grounded in the premise that emotions do not exist prior to social organization. Editors Timothy Willem Jones and Alana Harris open the volume with a historiography positioning emotional states in general, and “romantic love” in particular, as configurations unique to the cultures within which they arise, so that analysis of individual subjective feelings must be based on explorations of the broader context within which they were formed. Such an understanding grounds Laura King's use of romance novels and periodicals to discern ideals of the “perfect man,” April Gallwey's analysis of oral history archives to understand the experiences of lone mothers in an age when matrimony was at its height, and Stephen Brooke's deployment of Mass Observation responses as a source for gauging popular attitudes towards romantic cinema.

Charlotte Greenhalgh's chapter on love and marriage in old age is emblematic of this volume's efforts to address the more neglected aspects of romance, beginning with the observation that, in most cases, “histories of love and marriage have been left to the young” (145). Following the pattern referenced above, Greenhalgh first details the ways in which broader social changes, including greater economic security and earlier retirements after the Second World War, created new possibilities for companionate marriage. She then offers examples demonstrating how working-class individuals in particular developed more cooperative unions in later life, so that the “economic and social context of old age created opportunities for companionate marriage and mutuality, far from the sites of youthful romance and commercial entertainments that historians have privileged” (150). Equally innovative is Helen Smith's chapter, which draws on interviews of works conducted in Sheffield between 1917 and 1919 to demonstrate the ways in which definitions of respectable masculinity allowed for “many types of same-sex interactions, from workplace friendship to sexual relations to theatrical displays of cross-dressing,” indicating “a more diverse conception of masculinity than has been readily acknowledged” (63).

As the chapters progress, the interconnections between them multiply. When April Gallwey shows her subjects critiquing idealized images of married life found in popular culture (111), her analysis directly resonates with Stephen Brooke's exploration of how individuals pushed back against the images of love and romance in film and popular music. Likewise, Hera Cook's discussion of the “collapse of life-long monogamous marriage as a demographic and cultural norm” (227) picks up directly on the subject of Alana Harris's previous chapter, analyzing the postwar marriage guidance movement, and the work of the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council within it.

Another welcome feature of this study is that its analysis is primarily centered on the majority of the British population. The working-class experience dominates the first two-thirds of the book, while middle-class examples are primarily covered in the final chapters. This avoids an issue in many studies that begin with the better-known or more accessible perspective of the middle classes, implicitly naturalizing those experiences and treating the majority as counterpoint.

The benefits of grounding the analysis in individual reactions and social historical evidence seem all the more apparent when they are absent, such as in Gillian Swanson's chapter, which focuses on psychologist William McDougall. McDougall's work posited a conception of human subjectivity not based solely on egotistic motives, as Freud would have it (179), but instead on “a model of the dynamics of association that foregrounded an inherent capacity for attending to the interests of others” (166). This is a topic relevant to the concerns of this volume, and near the end of the chapter the author asserts that “McDougall's model of ‘sentiment development’ was taken up in applied contexts, from intelligence testing, criminology and psychiatric social work, to sex education and marriage reform” (178). But we are more told of this influence than shown it, and the reader is left uncertain over how those ideas were received by individuals who may have encountered them in the form of state policies.

The final essay in the collection, Hera Cook's, begins by reminding the reader of the volume's recurring theme, that “romantic love” is best understood as a “culturally constructed ‘myth,’ rather than a biochemical embodied event” (225), before discussing the ways in which individual middle-class women experienced and understood the origins of second-wave feminism, as recorded in the pages of the feminist periodical Nova between 1965 and 1970. Cook's close readings of individual narratives supports her observation that “there were no culturally acceptable means of expressing these feelings [of anger and distress] in 1960s England,” and it was “a willingness to be hostile to men” that became “the basic and much needed innovation of the women's liberation movement, along with sisterhood” (233, 239). These observations seem to encapsulate a change that separates the era under discussion in the book from later periods. In this way Cook's chapter serves as much as a conclusion for this excellent volume as the brief afterword that follows, in that it suggests the common insights that link to other chapters without explicitly drawing those conclusions.