ABSTRACT
The publication upon which this chapter will focus is Rhythm (1911-1913), a British little magazine that has not always fared well in the authorized version of modernist literary history.1 It was conceived by its original editors, John Middleton Murry and Michael Sadleir, as “the Yellow Book of the modern movement,” and offered a similar mixture of fiction, poetry, illustration, and reviews.2 Beside Murry and Sadleir, later in its run it published work by Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, and Rupert Brooke. Katherine Mansfield made her initial appearance in the number for Spring 1912, became co-editor in July, and published extensively from that point on. It supported a group of young French writers, the Fantaisistes, printing not only their work but their views on the state of contemporary French literature. It was also perceived as “an artist’s magazine”—“the organ of Post-Impressionism.”3 While reproducing images by Picasso, André Derain, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the core of its striking graphic work was supplied by a group who took their name from the magazine’s title: the Rhythmists.4 They assembled around the Scottish painter J. D. Fergusson, and adopted a style that drew upon, and adapted, the Fauvist idiom of brilliant colors and bold delineation of form.
