In this insightful and provocative study of influence, Sydney Janet Kaplan’s revisionist concern is “the ways that modernist literary history looks different when [John Middleton] Murry is at its centre” (9). Although Kaplan is not interested in making the much-maligned Murry “fashionable,” she highlights his early position in 1911 at “the forefront of the modernist venture in England” and his facilitation of the movement through his personal and professional relationships and circulation of ideas through the ensuing years (8, 4). Kaplan’s critical method is one of reading life and literature alongside one another, in a combination of close attention to the text, biographical criticism, and contextualization. This book therefore “attempts to explore the intensity and pressure of the daily life out of which its subjects produced their fiction and criticism” and is the first lengthy study that explicitly juxtaposes and highlights the simultaneity of events affecting the three authors with their writings (10). Although, as Kaplan points out in her introduction, biographical criticism may not—like Murry—be particularly fashionable, the resulting study is accomplished and illuminating. Murry’s unpublished journals (only recently made available after having been purchased by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand) are read as “texts” in correspondence “with his published writings: his literary and social criticism, his autobiography and his fiction,” as well as intertextually with writing by Mansfield and Lawrence (3, 10). Of particular note is the deftness of Kaplan’s interweaving of these various sources—some well known, some lesser known or obscure—where she efficiently moves through a number of texts, covering a large amount of ground without losing any depth. This makes for a highly readable but meticulously researched book, which is fluidly written in the same penetrative mode as the mutualistic influences of her subjects on one another. True to its title, this is a Venn diagram style of writing, where the method illustrates and mirrors its subject.

Over ten largely chronological chapters, Kaplan examines the intersections between the three authors and their writings. The introduction usefully, and relatively unusually, sets out how the author eventually settled on the Murry-Mansfield-Lawrence triad as the focus (different proposed incarnations of the project included a book on Mansfield and Woolf or one on Mansfield, Woolf, Murry, and Eliot, plus or minus Lawrence). The first three chapters discuss Murry’s novel Still Life (1916). The opening chapter positions the novel in terms of Murry’s development as a writer and the context of specific events, such as the Christmas party of 1914 where a series of plays included Mansfield and Murry acting out a scenario where Mansfield left Murry for the painter Mark Gertler, before returning to Murry (she abruptly changed the play to her remaining instead with Gertler, prompting much scandalized reaction among her audience). The chapter also provides a substantial account of the novel’s homosexual and lesbian subtexts, a theme that will return in later chapters. The second and third chapters position the novel in relation to Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), comparing similarities between the texts, and Mansfield’s “Bliss” (1920), where Kaplan suggests Mansfield and Murry’s “subliminally triangular relationship with Ottoline Morrell” as its context (68). The next chapter examines Mansfield and Murry’s influential reflections on each other’s writings, and Mansfield’s possible influences for her story “Je ne parle pas français” (1920). Kaplan’s discussion of the couple’s shared view of their “exceptionality” as writers is particularly interesting (89). She examines Murry’s more formal assessments of the writing of others in his wartime reviewing and his postwar editorship of the Athenaeum in the subsequent chapter, emphasizing how his professional relationships with contributors were inevitably influenced by his personal ones, particularly with Mansfield’s rival Virginia Woolf. Further chapters consider Mansfield and Murry’s discussion of the impersonal in art in their letters and reviews and a reading of Murry’s novel The Things We Are (1922). The final three chapters, entitled “Circulating Mansfield,” “Circulating Lawrence,” and “Circulating Murry,” provide focused readings of the individuals and their work, but always within the context of mutual exchange and influence with their contemporaries.

As a well-known scholar of Mansfield, having established her reputation with Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991), Kaplan demonstrates in this text that she remains at the top of her field. With the current boom in Mansfield studies—this is one of a series of titles concerning Mansfield published in 2010—it would be possible for this book to be treading familiar ground. Kaplan’s focus on Murry’s role within the genealogy of modernism and the complicated relationship between modernism and the concepts of both impersonality and “genius” offer a refreshing and highly informative analysis. Kaplan discusses new material, mutually enlightening on the work of Murry and his contemporaries, as well as providing persuasive and sophisticated readings of both familiar stories and lesser-known work. Kaplan is necessarily diverted into speculation at certain points, but it is clear that this is always informed, if not supported, by textual evidence in letters, diaries, or fiction. The balanced tone and rational quality of Kaplan’s writing means that her assessments are never excessive and are frequently qualified: for example, at the beginning of her three chapters on Still Life, she reassures the reader that she is not claiming the text as a lost masterpiece (13). At times, Kaplan’s circling of her subjects can mean that, at first glance, the argument of each chapter is not immediately explicit. However, her ability as a scholar allows her to coherently draw together the textual evidence of the fluctuating relations among these three intense characters. In her final chapter, she reminds us of the shift from Lawrence’s advocacy of his and Murry’s Blutbruderschaft in 1916 to his cruel caricatures of Murry in stories written in 1924 (195). The comprehensive index and bibliography also add to our navigation of the text. Intensely researched and absorbing to read, Kaplan’s excellent book illuminates the mutual influence of these key figures within modernism and, in so doing, why they, and the period they lived in, remain so fascinating to us today.