E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot all engaged in their critical and creative works with Edwardian liberalism: with the reformist policies of the Liberal Party in England (which came to power in 1905), with the New Liberal ideas on which these policies were based, but also and more broadly with the much older philosophical and political outlook of liberalism. The works and theories of these early modernists were written in direct response to liberal ideas old and new, with even anti-liberal ‘classical’ modernists such as Hulme and Eliot embracing fundamental liberal values (while of course rejecting many others). A consideration of Forster’s short story ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ (1904), Ford’s 1912 poem ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’, Hulme’s essays in The Commentator (1911–12), and Eliot’s programmatic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) shows how, much as with many other contradictory facets of literary modernism, the relationship of modernism to liberalism was close, uneasy, and foundational.

Chapter 3 examines the discord aesthetic in three cross-sex collaborations that sought to critique, invigorate, or reconfigure marriage. Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Ford in their 1913 travel book The Desirable Alien model an innovative conjugal dynamic that privileges articulations of disagreement and destabilizes fixed gender roles by placing the writers’ distinct textual contributions in unresolved dialogue. I then read a similar attempt to re-conceptualize marriage as a shared quest to negotiate conflict without eradicating it as central to W. B. Yeats and George Yeats’s practice of automatic writing in the early years of their marriage. Finally, I turn from these heterosexual couples to consider the collaboration between Marianne Moore, a celibate unmarried woman, and her gay male friend Monroe Wheeler on the publication of her poem “Marriage” as the third and final chapbook in Wheeler’s Manikin series in 1923. Far from reinforcing traditional gender roles and hierarchies, these examples show how cross-sex collaboration might serve as the basis for truly innovative marriages based on a couple’s shared commitment to mutual empowerment and gender flexibility.

One of Ford’s heart patients in The Good Soldier (1915), a Mr Hurlbird, has a habit of handing out ‘cool California oranges’ to everyone he meets. Ford offers little explanation for this behaviour beyond the clue that Hurlbird is a ‘violent Democrat’ – a phrase that would perhaps have conjured in the minds of contemporary readers the endeavours of William Jennings Bryan and other economic pragmatists to introduce a version of what we would now call ‘quantitative easing’: namely, an agreement from the US central bank to print money according to demand. This chapter proposes that British attitudes towards monetary value in the first two decades of the twentieth century were beginning to give way to the influence of American pragmatists like Bryan. Keynes writes in an essay of 1923: ‘The fluctuations in the value of money since 1914 have been on a scale so great as to constitute … one of the most significant events in the economic history of the world.’ Monetary value was beginning to change its character from a non-negotiable essence to an instrument of policy. This chapter traces the imprint of this incipient British economic pragmatism in the work of Keynes, Conrad, and Ford.