The English Review

Overview

The English Review was first published in 1908 and was intended to be a venue that would spotlight the finest writers of the era, as well as give a voice to new writers. The English Review published a mixture of Victorian and Edwardian authors like Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, along with rising modernist writers like Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. The journal is often credited with being more "modernist" than it actually was, but it was nevertheless a major literary journal of the time.

The original editor, Ford Madox Hueffer had an eye for literary talent but very little talent for business. Yet despite its literary excellence, the new venture was not a financial success. The magazine was designed to be a monthly magazine of approximately 175 pages, each sold for half a crown. The English Review did not exceed a circulation of 1,000 during Hueffer's editorship, and the cost of printing far exceeded the income of sales. His financial fickleness lost money so fast that the editorship was taken away from him about a year into the printing and he was forced to sell the magazine. His successor, Austin Harrison, though a mores responsible business man, lacked much of Ford's vision and was viewed as a debaser of a great magazine, but he gave voice to many important authors of his time.

After the First World War, however, the journal once again faced financial hardship and losses in readership.  Harrison was forced to sell The English Review in 1923, but subsequent editors took the journal in an increasingly conservative and less literary direction. The magazine was eventually absorbed by The National Review in 1923.