Book Review: The World Broke In Two
/The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature
by Bill Goldstein
Henry Holt, 2017
“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” – so Willa Cather wrote in 1936, and college undergraduates have been worrying it like a soup-bone ever since. That worrying writ large forms the kernel of Bill Goldstein’s new book The World Broke In Two, with its leave-nothing-to-the-imagination subtitle, “Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature,” which centers on some of the key figures in the Western literary world in the year 1922. Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times books website, recounts the professional and personal lives of his main characters and a big cast of others in chummy detail (“Hearing of Virginia’s latest relapse in May, Tom wrote in sympathy to Leonard …”), all set against a backdrop of the WWI aftermath that Goldstein contends is psychologically crucial. . .