The 1918 Fisher Education Act, championed by Herbert Fisher, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, raised the school-leaving age to fourteen, encouraged local authorities to progress more pupils from elementary to secondary school, and recommended continued part-time education for those in work ages fourteen to sixteen. While the school-leaving age was increased in 1921, the act's other provisions were thwarted by interwar cuts in public expenditure. Only after the Second World War did Britain see widespread educational reform, with the introduction of universal secondary education following the Butler Act of 1944. In her recent addition to Bloomsbury's Historicizing Modernism, a book series devoted to analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist literature in its historical contexts, Natasha Periyan argues that pressing debates surrounding education and the need for its extension were central to the politics of a wide range of 1930s British writers. W. H. Auden, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Stephen Spender, and George Orwell all taught or gave speeches in schools during the 1930s, and Virginia Woolf lectured for the Workers’ Educational Association in 1940. By drawing attention to the activities of 1930s writers as teachers, Periyan contends that education crucially informed this decade's cultural criticism.

Critical narratives of 1930s British literature have traditionally revolved around a core group of young, male, leftist, public-school-educated writers dubbed the Auden Generation in Samuel Hynes's classic study of the same name (1976). As Periyan observes in her introduction, education has long been significant in defining and categorizing this critical field, yet the extent of 1930s writers’ engagements with education have been largely overlooked. Periyan addresses this omission by interrogating the influence of pedagogic activity and debates on a diverse spread of authors: Arthur Calder-Marshall, Cyril Connolly, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Walter Greenwood, and Antonia White, in addition to those mentioned above. One of the most refreshing aspects of this study is how its thematic approach leads Periyan to read across writers usually separated into factions according to their “generation” or categorization by critics as middlebrow or modernist. Another is its reading across different kinds of literary sources, including essays, pamphlets, textbooks, and school songs, as well as poetry, fiction, autobiography, and personal papers.

In each of the book's five chapters Periyan interprets the politics of a different writer or network of writers through their experience of education and participation in educational debates. Chapter 1 provides a detailed investigation of Auden's ideals as a teacher throughout the 1930s and considers how far his activity as an educationalist informed his socialism and his aesthetics. Particularly of note here is Periyan's meticulous analysis of the school song Auden composed for Raynes Park School in 1936 in relation to his verse and wider writing. Chapter 2 considers Holtby's and Brittain's work as teachers and their involvement in campaigns for equal pay and against the marriage bar through the Six Point Group and the National Union of Women Teachers. It explores the dialogue between this activity, their political journalism, and their literary representations of pedagogic figures in 1930s texts, with an especially strong reading of the headmistress Sarah Burton and the woman teacher more broadly in Holtby's novel South Riding (1936).

In chapter 3, Periyan turns to The Old School (1934), a collection of essays edited by Graham Greene critiquing the era's prominent public schools with additional contributions on girls’ schools, a grammar school, and a state elementary school. Her discussion opens with an overview of the collection and Greene's editorial aims before showcasing the volume's diversity by exploring contributions by four further writers of different educational backgrounds. This expansive central chapter examines (1) Walter Greenwood's contribution on “Langy Road Council School,” an elementary school in the Salford slums, alongside his novel Love on the Dole (1933); (2) Stephen Spender's essay “Day Boy” alongside his novel The Backward Son (1940) and different versions of the poem “An Elementary School Class Room in a Slum” from 1935, 1939, and 1955); (3) Antonia White's “Child of the Five Wounds,” an account of her experience of and removal from a strict convent school alongside her novel Frost in May (1933), which fictionalizes this experience, and her feminist, antiauthoritarian contributions to The Schoolmistress, a teacher's paper; and (4) Arthur Calder-Marshall's Old School essay on St. Paul's alongside his public-school novel Dead Centre (1935) and Challenge to Schools (1935), a pamphlet published by the Hogarth Press.

Chapter 4 returns to a single-author focus as Periyan makes a compelling case for Woolf's engagement with contemporary educational discourses in her late works, including her novel The Years (1937), her antiwar pamphlet Three Guineas (1938), and her lecture/essay “The Leaning Tower” (1940). In contrast to previous scholarship investigating Woolf's anti-institutional approach to education, Periyan posits that Woolf saw reform of educational institutions through the provision of working-class education and “multilateral” (later termed “comprehensive”) schooling as vital for the development of cultural and political democracy. In the final chapter, Periyan again takes a multiauthor approach by tracing the interchange between educational background, cultural values, politics and literary method in the work of three Eton-educated writers. Periyan sweeps deftly through analysis of Orwell's documentary The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1938)—part literary criticism, part memoir—and Henry Green's public-school autobiography Pack My Bag (1940) to show how each writer's literary style evolved in response and resistance to their privileged Etonian education.

In the aftermath of the First World War, education was increasingly understood as a matter of citizenship and social and political empowerment as much as a means of producing an effective and efficient labor force. This extensively researched monograph demonstrates how the issue of education fed into the politics and cultural discourse of the 1930s and throws up pertinent new connections between writers, literary texts, and historical sources. It is a valuable addition to the body of criticism on 1930s British literature.