Time and Tide arrived in the cultural landscape at the start of a propitious decade for British modernism. Two of modernism's landmark texts, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, appeared in 1922, the annus mirabilis of modernism which also saw the launch of Eliot's literary review, the Criterion, ‘an institution crucial to the dissemination and consolidation of modernist writing’ in the early processes of modernism's canonisation (Harding 2009: 349). Modernism remains the dominant cultural force in most critical accounts of the period, though a growing body of scholarship has done much to recover and explore a broad spectrum of writing that existed alongside and in competition with it. Time and Tide has much to contribute to revisionary accounts of the period. From its first issue the periodical carried several pages of cultural content, including reviews of music, theatre and books, as well as original creative contributions (short fiction, poems). None of the early creative work can be described as modernist, and in its reviewing of contemporary literature Time and Tide was completely silent during its early years on the canonised male trio of Wyndham Lewis, Eliot and Joyce, although it did regularly review female modernists, including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. For Time and Tide's early writers and critics literary modernism was not the most central or important aspect of modern culture, but this does not mean that they were unfamiliar with its key texts and discourses, or that the literary and artistic trends it did examine were unimportant. Indeed, I will argue that Time and Tide's conversation with modernism in its review pages highlights both the limits of the modernist lens for assessing culture in this period, and the perspicuity of this periodical's female writers and critics in their analysis of cultural hierarchies already in the process of being established.

This chapter examines how a select group of Time and Tide's regular female columnists mediated culture in the early years of this modern feminist magazine from 1920 to 1926. Demonstrating that contributors to its review columns were in close touch with a wide range of literary and artistic developments after the war, it argues that the periodical's mediation of culture is identifiably feminist, both in its promotion of women in the arts, and in its response to developments in criticism in the interwar years.