"The Brief and Brilliant Life of The Athenaeum Under Mr. Middleton Murry" (T.S. Eliot)

Abstract

From April 1919 until its demise in February 1921 The Athenaeum, widely acclaimed as the most influential Victorian literary magazine, was edited by John Middleton Murry, who turned it into a journal that espoused modernist views and introduced pathbreaking critical principles. He enlisted a set of contributors who were soon to emerge as the shapers of a new cultural taste in Britain, including such writers as T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Stratchey, and E.M. Forster. The present essay seeks to shed some light on Murry's recruitment of his contributors as well as on their performance in this The Athenaeum's final phase.