Romantic Moderns concerns itself with English writers, artists & the imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Alexandra Harris tells the history of the 1930s & 1940s in which writers & artists explored what it meant to be alive, at that moment in time, in Engl&. Harris portrays English modernists who show, in their various ways, that ‘the modern’ need not be at war with the past & different eras & theories could work together in particular celebration of locality & the English climate. Virginia Woolf wrote about a village pageant on a showery summer day, Florence White collected regional recipes & Christopher Tunnard designed modern English gardens with a firmly 18-th century feel. Also feeding Romantic Moderns & the sense of finding & imagining possible homes, for themselves & their art, in England are E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells & Cecil Beaton.