Ruth Hoberman enlists an array of literary texts to illuminate her claim that modernism emerged not simply from the repudiated ruins of Victorian realism but instead from “the conflicts and ironies dramatized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museum narratives” (166). By exploring fiction published between 1890 and 1914, Hoberman invites historians, art historians, and above all literary scholars to see how museums furnished a productive stage to frame larger cultural debates about the function of art. Although Hoberman has much to say and evidence to harness about museums aligned with imperialism, state power, and patriarchy; with order, progress, and surveillance; and with acquisition and appropriation, the “trouble” of her title alludes to a counterpoint in these museum narratives, one in which museum themes release what she calls in her final chapter the “museum dreams” of modernism. Hoberman’s concluding chapter reads museum materials in Yeats, Joyce, and Woolf as evidence of this full-fledged critique, along with alternatives to the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic problems posed in Edwardian visions of museums. In this respect, Hoberman adheres to the modernist imperative “to make it new.” For her trio of modernists, museums offer flexible representations not only to challenge the forms of domination lodged in museal narratives in turn-of-the-century fiction but also to imagine alternative museums. To give one example here, Mrs. Ramsay’s domelike space of intimate domesticity in To the Lighthouse (1927) contrasts with the imperious patriarchal sphere in Woolf’s depictions of the Reading Room of the British Museum in Jacob’s Room (1922) and in A Room of One’s Own (1929). On one hand, I admire the incredibly thorough inventory of Hoberman’s investigation of so much museal fiction lodged between Victorian literature and modernism. On the other hand, I was surprised to find that this exciting and nuanced attention to Edwardian novels ultimately serves as the launching pad, the necessary groundwork, for the aesthetically superior interventions of museal work in modernism.

Most captivating about Museum Trouble are the “complex fictions” (190) built around museal scenes in Edwardian literature. In each chapter, Hoberman categorizes her museum narratives to reveal a different facet of this “trouble.” By the end of the nineteenth century, the museum was an institution linked to British identity, but it was also a focal point for debates about the role of the arts in public culture: controversies that encompassed questions about class, nation, and gender. An early chapter explores the rise of the art professional in stories such as Henry James’s The Outcry (1911) about “art-drain rhetoric” (53), as national museums were forced to sell artwork to buyers abroad. This anxiety about the depletion of the national stores of art also encompassed questions about what was genuine art and who was the arbiter of its value. Hoberman turns not only to fiction but also to articles that ran in periodicals about the art expert, or what she calls “scientific connoisseurship,” as a profession that emerges in this era. Bernhard (Bernard) Berenson, Vernon Lee, and Roger Fry all explored ideas of art expertise, sometimes through theories about the sensory response of viewers to aesthetic objects. These ideas circulate through fiction such as E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), when Lucy Honeychurch claims she should appreciate the “tactile values” of Giotto’s frescoes (62). Not only does The Outcry offer the most extensive literary instantiation of this “art drain” anxiety, but James’s fiction figures generously in the early chapters of the book.

The third chapter, “Museum Gothic: Objects That ‘Tell,’” extends the growing fascination with things and thing theories (e.g., Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel [Chicago, 2006]) into the early twentieth century. Hoberman traces how writers drew on gothic conventions in order to explore “museal ekphrasis” (81) and the limits and possibilities of verbal and visual representations of art, as well as larger questions about aesthetics. What and how do art objects convey meaning to viewers? Does this meaning come through a magical sensory experience? Do museums offer a refuge from the marketplace, or are they coterminous with an increasingly ubiquitous commodity-consumer culture? Ghosts, mummies, and dreams punctuate fictional encounters with museum objects, evidence of anxieties about colonial appropriation or about commodity fetishism.

Hoberman moves to the bodies of museumgoers in scenes of aesthetic appreciation in chapter 4. In one of her many spirited readings, Hoberman argues that Forster’s novels, including The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View, and Maurice (1971), queer the museum by transposing artifacts into “images of transgressive sexuality” (119) as young male museumgoers realize same-sex desires. For women, especially suffragettes who attack art holdings in museums both within and beyond fiction, museum stories highlight how women’s bodies have been framed by men who hold the power of the paint brush and the pen (125). Hoberman’s attention to women in museums, in relation to “new women” with their broader access to public spaces and professions, leads into the chapter devoted to the British Museum. Here she argues that evolutionary discourse underwrites both acquisitions and exhibitions as depicted in these British Museum stories that suggest the proliferating power of British imperialism.

The British Museum Library, with its selective collection of books, is in partnership, in Hoberman’s account, with this project to define, enforce, and maintain “only one kind of knowledge” (152). Yet the Reading Room, too, is a representational space for larger cultural “trouble.” In novels by Doyle, James, George Gissing, Dora McChesney, May Sinclair, and H. G. Wells, readers meet many characters who labor under the oppression of this institutional space whose patriarchal design is affirmed by the 1907 redecoration that installed the names of nineteen male writers around the room’s circular dome. Hoberman claims here that although the ladies’s seating area, part of the original 1857 arrangement of the reading room, was eliminated during the 1907 renovations, this was only because the library’s public space was “now identified with an established, implicitly male canon” (163). Sometimes, as here, the “museum trouble” gets muted a bit, as less a matter of robust controversy about changing social places of gender, nationality, and class and more a matter of the museum as an emblem of state and other kinds of domination.

If Ezra Pound, as Hoberman quotes, proclaimed in 1909, “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind” (165), Museum Trouble makes a strong case for how modernists depended on such public institutions in order to dismantle them in form and theory. Even more, this book establishes the museal narratives that immediately predate literary modernism as the necessary field from which Woolf, for instance, best launched her alternative “room of one’s own.” There is a wealth of historical material in this book; for anyone with an interest in British museums, especially the British Museum, there is much collateral information on museum administration, on questions about public access, and on exhibits and educating the public about art. At every step of her argument, Hoberman mobilizes an astonishing collection of museal narratives from familiar and unfamiliar writers. Organized and displayed well, Museum Trouble is its own verbal museum of Edwardian literary artifacts.