Alexandra Harris has just had the busiest four months of her life. Last September she launched her book Romantic Moderns, a reinterpretation of English culture in the 1930s and ’40s, featuring, amongst others, Virginia Woolf, John Piper, Cecil Beaton and John Betjeman. The book centres on their turn from a totalising modernism to embrace a sense of Englishness that had roots in romanticism: hence, ‘romantic moderns’.
Far from the brutal strangeness we associate with modern art, Harris suggests that a warmer, less confrontational mode was the main current of British culture in the last century, celebrating the familiar and the traditional. Through this sense of a quintessential Englishness – the parish church, the seaside pier – artists and writers offered the public a way into their work. The same is true for Harris’ own book: her inclusive and broad-ranging approach allows Romantic Moderns to reach well beyond an academic audience. In December, it won the Guardian First Book Award.
‘Most academics want to make everything difficult,’ she tells me, ‘but people like T.S. Eliot were writing for a general audience. They wanted to be popular.’ When Harris started her thesis on Woolf, she thought maybe ten people would read it. But the project began to absorb more and more. Books she read for pleasure, a mosaic she saw at the British Museum, all made their way into what became Romantic Moderns. ‘I had the extraordinary realisation that I was writing a thesis I really wanted to be writing!’
One reason for its popularity, she speculates, is that ‘people like being given permission to enjoy art that’s a little more quiet and traditional.’ What Romantic Moderns offers is a way to link up some familiar treasures of an older English culture that has been neglected and disdained by most contemporary artists and critics, whom Harris worries are too detached from popular taste. For her, art criticism should give people ‘the confidence and inspiration to link up things in their own lives.’
That approach requires embracing individuality and subjectivity, something Harris is keen to do. There is an ‘awkwardness about being personal’ in academia but really, she says, ‘all our writing is autobiographical.’ Romantic Moderns is unashamedly personal,’ it is a world created out of links between things, from literature and painting to cookery and gardening. As an interpretation, it is a work of imagination just as much as any novel.
Romantic Moderns seems like a once-in-a-lifetime work, the product of a set of personal affinities and time to think about how they connect. But she assures me, ‘I have plenty of interests left!’ And her next book (barring an introduction to Virginia Woolf that she’s just finished) sounds as idiosyncratic as her last. With a scope stretching from medieval to modern, it’s a welcome opportunity, she tells me, to go back and do her undergraduate English degree again, ‘and read The Faerie Queene properly this time!’ The subject: the weather. What could be more English than that?
