SOURCE: Review of Group Portrait, by Nicholas Delbanco. Southern Humanities Review 18, no. 3 (summer 1984): 268-69.

In the following review, the critic asserts that Group Portrait offers little new factual information concerning the community of six authors in London in 1900, and that the central ideas of the book are not argued in depth.

In 1900 within a day's journey from each other, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and H. G. Wells were neighbors in Kent and East Sussex. Comparing their situation to the expatriate Left Bank of Paris and to Bloomsbury, Nicholas Delbanco examines the community of these artists [in Group Portrait]. None of the writers were native to the region, and Delbanco maintains that their aggregation there was a “conscious retreat, a place of exile.” Although the book jacket promises a “biographical study of writers in community,” there is little biographical material in this book except...