Rupert Brooke, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry—these are all familiar faces on the modern British literary scene, but what do they have to do with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, the Fantaisiste poet Francis Carco, the Scottish artist J. D. Fergusson, and the publishers Martin Secker and Charles Granville? The answer, Faith Binckes suggests in her useful study, is that they were all involved in the brief but nonetheless influential lives of the British modernist magazine Rhythm, which ran from summer 1911 to spring 1913, and its successor, the Blue Review, which went under in July 1913. The chief players in the drama are Murry, who, after cofounding Rhythm with M. T. H. Sadler, served as editor, and Mansfield, one of the magazine's most important contributors and also, by July 1912, its sole assistant editor. Mansfield's role in the Blue Review was more marginal, but Murry remained as editor to the very end. Later Murry would treat Rhythm and the Blue Review as “primarily expressive of his relationship with Mansfield” (97), and Binckes acknowledges its importance to her story by devoting one of her central chapters to its impact on the two magazines. As Binckes makes clear, though, there is much more to the story of Rhythm and the Blue Review than a mere episode in the Mansfield-Murry saga. It's a story that tells us a great deal about how the magazine and publishing culture of the modern period shaped the careers of a wide range of artists. It sheds some light, too, on the larger question of how British modernism was made.

Binckes begins in chapter 1 with a detailed account of the difficulties Murry and Mansfield encountered in their efforts to keep Rhythm afloat in the tricky if shallow—tricky because shallow—waters of avant-garde magazine finance. Her second chapter follows up by examining Rhythm's attempts to forge a distinct but financially viable identity in an avant-garde culture still dominated by “the ideal of the continental literary periodical or little magazine as the textual negative of English philistinism” (71), an ideal that had emerged in the 1890s, the heyday of Savoy and the Yellow Book. In a climate that equated literary success with financial failure, Binckes argues, Rhythm faced the further challenge of “having to establish itself as an inheritor of those iconic little magazines of the 1890s while separating itself from the negative associations of Aestheticism, and of placing itself among a plethora of ‘isms’” (41). The variable, flexible notion of “rhythm” was, of course, central to the magazine's strategies for self-differentiation: in Murry's view, the term's vagueness was a source of value in a volatile literary culture often marked by programmatic aesthetic stances and aggressively oppositional tactics. But Rhythm wasn't just about weak cups of tea. Binckes's third chapter shows that by developing such Parisian contacts as Francis Carco, Murry positioned Rhythm as a cosmopolitan periodical that promoted “cross-pollination, as well as competition,” among a broad range of national artistic influences (75).

The most consequential episodes in Binckes's story concern Rhythm's role in introducing the British public to postimpressionist art. One of these episodes concerns the rivalry between Rhythm and the New Age over the publication of Picasso reproductions in the immediate aftermath of the first postimpressionist exhibition, which had featured some of his representational work. Rhythm beat the New Age to the punch by reproducing the 1906 Peasants from Andorra in its inaugural summer 1911 issue. That this 1906 picture was not cubist, however, limited the prestige that Rhythm otherwise might have gained by “being the first British publication to reproduce a Picasso” (56). Rhythm's claim to modernist bragging rights became even more questionable when, later the same year, the New Age reproduced Mandolin, Wine Glass and Table: now known as La Mandoline et la Pernod, this certainly was a cubist picture. Binckes is typically astute in her assessment of the ensuing “tussle” for avant-garde status, arguing persuasively that the overlaps and interactions between these two magazines, or what she calls “competitive networks of difference,” confirm “some of the pitfalls of defining constructions of the avant-garde by way of singular breakthroughs” (58). This sense of messy complication is central to Binckes's wider claims about the emergence of aesthetic modernism more generally.

In a second crucial episode, discussed in chapter 5, Binckes considers Rhythm as a venue for developing an alternative notion of postimpressionism that would compete with Roger Fry's already influential account. Noting how Rhythm's attention to Kandinsky and André Derain (one of whose woodcut illustrations was reproduced in the Winter 1911 issue) suggested its cosmopolitanism, Binckes offers some interesting insights into the magazine's promotion of neglected women artists and to its larger discursive interest in gender. It was women artists such as Anne Estelle Rice, Jessica Dismorr, and Marguerite Thompson who “formed the core of the Rhythmists,” Binckes contends (135), and together they helped to set Rhythm in opposition to the masculinism that sometimes characterized the avant-garde in the early twentieth century. Neglected by Fry, whose version of postimpressionism proved triumphant in the British art world, these women artists are missing from most of the numerous academic art histories that have followed his lead. Binckes, however, makes a strong case for their inclusion. Especially telling is her discussion of how women rhythmists handled the female nude in their drawings and woodcuts, which emphasized not color but line—its rhythm, but also its reproducibility.

Concluding with discussions of the less experimental Blue Review and of Lawrence's and Murry's even shorter-lived venture The Signature, which ran all of three issues in autumn 1915, Binckes's book offers a full, rounded, and reliable portrait of a distinctive and, as she argues, surprisingly neglected chapter in the history of the modernist magazine world. While readers looking for narratives that range more widely over the field of modernist periodical culture will still want to go to Mark Morrisson and Jayne Marek, Binckes, with her patience and scrupulous attention to detail, gives us as good an account of this particular plot as we are likely to have.