In her superb biography Virginia Woolf (1996), Hermione Lee summarized the Edwardian years by saying that they "polarised conservatives and dissenters."

The voices of the Establishment—that is, the people who had been ruling England for centuries—"spoke for Christianity, patriotism, the defence of the realm, and women in their place; against degeneracy, poisonous foreign influences, effeminacy, pacifism, cowardice, modernism and the weakening of the race." Woolf herself, although raised in an almost classically decorous, even fussy Victorian home, "was always explicitly on the radical, subversive and modern side of this cultural divide" in her writing, as Lee puts it, and her short story "The Mark on the Wall" was one of her first works to exhibit all of these attributes.

One of the most significant cultural events of the Edwardian era took place in 1910 when the Post-Impressionist Exhibition mounted by Roger Fry introduced the...