This magnificently produced republication of Ede's biography, originally published in 1931, is a valuable resource for Mansfield scholars seeking to situate her life and work within cross-disciplinary and transnational modernist networks and collaborations. A contributor to Rhythm, a friend of Mansfield and Murry, and the occasion for Mansfield's admiration and hostility, Gaudier is a fascinating figure in Mansfield's life and artistic milieu. Ede's biography of the artist he admired but never knew is itself a remarkable artifact in the reception history of modernism, plunging its reader into the passionate work of recuperation and recovery of this influential figure. As the co-editors, Sebastiano Barassi and Jon Wood, write in their foreword, by 1927 ‘Gaudier was slowly fading into obscurity’ (4), pace Ezra Pound's immortalisation of the sculptor in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916). Much of Gaudier's work and possessions after his 1915 death in World War One were acquired by Ede in his capacity as Tate Gallery curator in 1926, including almost one thousand hand-written pages of memoir by Gaudier's bereft, ailing companion, Sophie Brzeska. Co-editor Evelyn Silber, the most prominent scholar of Gaudier's work, contributes an essay to this volume in which she explains Ede's sources and how the curator recovered Gaudier's life through these pages and correspondence, written in French, English and Polish. Silber describes the ‘vivid conversational style and emotional rawness’ of this writing, which provided Ede with the opportunity ‘of eavesdropping on [the couple's] lives and innermost thoughts’ (256).

Readers of this volume have renewed access to Ede's own ardent recovery of Gaudier's life, as he turned from his professional role as art historian and curator to the more experimental role of biographer, creating what Barassi and Wood describe as a well-researched ‘fiction’ from Sophie's manuscripts and correspondence (255). Barassi, Wood and Silber provide extraordinarily meticulous and thorough explanatory footnotes and essays, a chronology, a catalogue of source materials, and lavish illustrative materials. The visual works include full-colour plates of Gaudier's sketches, drawings, paintings and designs, as well as reproductions of all eight cover designs for successive editions of Savage Messiah. These covers, too, tell a story about modernism's reception history over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.