SOURCE: Moser, Thomas C. “Views of Edwardian Fiction.” Sewanee Review 91, no. 2 (April 1983): 282-91.

In the following review, Moser compares Group Portrait with two other books on Edwardian fiction. Moser comments that Delbanco's book is neatly organized and well-written, and that the strength of the book lies in the author's expression of a strong sense of affection for his subject.

Even though all periods, all decades, are transitional, the Edwardian age is one of the most conspicuous. Richard Ellmann's phrase is the “two faces” of Edward; Samuel Hynes's, the Edwardian “turn of mind.” Between the end of Victoria's lengthy reign with its intellectual, technological revolutions and its gigantic novelists and 1914's initiation of a period of incredible, almost incessant, international violence and flashy modernist writers, the intervening years must somehow, from our point of view, account for the change. Three new books, of greatly differing approach and quality, take...