Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist's light on the relationship between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. Feldman examines the works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist)and William James (philosopher and psychologist) and relates them to select twentieth-century creations.