The work is a cogent and convincing assessment of numerous responses to education in the literature of the 1930s, but the argument resists the temptation to generalize ...The characterization of the writers resonates often with Woolf's “The Leaning Tower,” but the methodology allows readers to spark their own fires from the friction of the commentaries on related texts, legislation, letters, etc.: an instance of an individualist educative technique in itself, perhaps.

Modernism/modernity

An excellent contribution to a well-established tradition of feminist scholarship on writers of both sexes in the 1930s ... Periyan is attentive to the relationship between literary style and politics, and her analysis of the textual variations in the 1935, 1939, and 1955 versions of Stephen Spender's 'An Elementary School Classroom' in relation to working-class agency, reform, revolution, and the impersonal forces of history is accomplished.

The Review of English Studies

One of the most refreshing aspects of this study is how its thematic approach leads Periyan to read across writers usually separated into factions according to their "generation" or categorization by critics as middlebrow or modernist ... Extensively researched ... A valuable addition to the body of criticism on 1930s British literature.

Journal of British Studies