Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris

The modernism we know about, or think we do, was fierce and sharp-edged, all the better to scythe down the past and start all over again. During the interwar period, making things new became the mantra. History was a jumbled lumber-room of habits and beliefs that we would all do much better without: it had led, after all, to the carnage of the trenches. All those bits and pieces from previous centuries – the clutter, the junk, the sheer bulk of countless pointless objects – needed to be swept away. Homes, in the words of Le Corbusier, were to become "machines for living", complete with kitchenettes and pull-down beds. And instead of watercolour landscapes and ancestral portraits on the walls, there would be an art composed of white circles etched upon white squares floating upon white paper. If there were to be any colour in this weightless world, it was to be found checked within Mondrian's strict grids.

This, though, wasn't the only modernism in town. In this brilliant book, longlisted for the Guardian first book award, Alexandra Harris sets out to show that English culture between the wars contained another strand, one she calls romantic modernism. Whereas high modernism wanted to lay waste to the material past in order to re-fashion it upon rational lines, romantic modernists had a soft spot for what had gone before. They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England's crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.

We have, of course, always known about this strand of mid-20th-century culture. John Betjeman and his church crawls, Beverley Nichols and his cottage garden, Edith Sitwell and her dressing-up box hardly count as lost objects. But at best these figures have tended to seem like extra limbs, dangling untidily from the main narrative of English culture between the wars. And at worst they have appeared just plain embarrassing, a reminder that some writers and painters simply failed to get with the programme (or, worse, didn't realise there was a programme in the first place). One of the tasks Harris sets herself is to weave these lost modernists back into the main weft of British culture, rescuing them from their status as lovable eccentrics or – worse still – "national treasures", granting them instead the dignity of an identity as self-conscious intellectuals trying to make sense of difficult times.

Harris's second, and trickier, task is to show how many of the people whose high modernist credentials have always seemed impeccable were actually deeply drawn to the impure forms of the past. Her emblematic anecdote concerns Le Corbusier dining at the Reform Club. At one moment, perhaps when he thought no one was looking, the great moderniser was spotted sensuously fingering the Victorian mouldings of the club's faux Roman-Renaissance columns. The man who wanted the thinking classes to live in white boxes turned out to have a fondness for curls and curves after all.

Not all of Harris's subjects are quite so obliging when it comes to furnishing this kind of shorthand. Mostly, she is obliged to track her romantic modernists stealthily, noticing a glint in their eye when they make a detour to visit Stonehenge, read an Anglo-Saxon poem or express a sneaking regard for the folk tunes that Cecil Sharp had rescued from oblivion. Others, such as Cecil Beaton, require a more probing approach. In a particularly fine section, Harris describes how the photographer managed to fashion himself simultaneously as a silver-suited futurist and an 18th-century squire. In his decayed Wiltshire manor house, Beaton mocked up a Georgian fantasia by making over junk shop furniture with swags of cheap velvet. Weekend guests, including David Cecil and Augustus John, shuffled their identities in the ormolu mirrors and posed for period tableaux. History became something that could be invented rather than inherited, and was all the better for it.

Beaton is one of the many bit players who do sterling work supporting Harris's thesis. There are, nonetheless, two figures whose journeys are considered important enough to find their way into her book's subtitle: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Piper is best remembered these days for his love affair with England's ancient churches. Harris, though, reminds us that he started in a different place entirely. In the early 30s he was an abstract artist with a capital A, balancing pure form and colour with the best of them. As a true believer in Roger Fry's progressive manifesto, Piper looked to Europe for inspiration, imbibing and producing an art that determinedly floated above national boundaries. His future wife Myfanwy even edited Axis, the house journal for the aesthetic avant garde.

But something happened to Piper in 1934 – around the same time that Betjeman stopped pretending to be keen on new buildings. Having studied photographs of the English landscape taken from the air, he started to see and feel in three dimensions. Using collage, he built up his canvases with bits of torn newspaper and scrunched doilies. Blotting paper and music manuscripts were scribbled over with ink and gouache to recreate the untidy shorelines of Kent and Sussex. Brooding on what he had made, Piper came to the ringing conclusion that pure abstraction was "undernourished". What was needed was a return to representation, not of the plodding weekend-painter variety, but in a way that acknowledged the presence of what he famously described as "the tree in the field". From this point, Piper's work turned to new and nourishing directions. His painterly investigations of Oxfordshire's farm buildings and Wales's Georgian ruins involved mapping a strikingly modern cubist sensibility on to the much older romantic tradition of Gilpin and Girtin. The result was deep pleasure for both eye and soul.

As Piper's love of lichen and leaf-filtered light suggests, romantic modernism was happiest in the country. If a Domesday Book had been compiled in the late 30s, recording the inhabitants of villages and outlying farms, it would include most of the main figures of English arts and letters: the Woolfs in Rodmell, the Pipers at Fawley Bottom, EM Forster in Abinger, Stanley Spencer at Cookham, Beverley Nichols at Glatton. True, TS Eliot stayed mainly in the city, but from his Faber office he commissioned, improbable though it sounds, books on soil management. For while high modernism hung out in smoky jazz bars, romantic modernism tended to pile on the jumpers and sit round the kitchen table, scoffing a delicious stew composed of ingredients foraged from the hedgerows. When it took to the roads it did so with a well-thumbed Victorian gazetteer in the glove compartment or perhaps an edition of Gilbert White's Selborne or Thomas Bewick's British Birds. Not that it rejected all evidence of modernity. When new guides to the English landscape were called for, it seemed only right and proper that they should be sponsored by Shell-Mex. In yet another twist, Vanessa Bell, once the doyenne of French-facing art, undertook to paint the Sussex village of Alfriston for one of the petroleum megalith's signature posters.

It would be impossible to over-emphasise what a clever book Romantic Moderns is. It is a kind one too, showing tactful generosity towards people and places, sights and sounds, that have tended to get written off as embarrassing or just plain wrong. Never has this seemed more important than now, as we work through our own complicated millennial feelings about the romance of the past. Thanks to Harris it no longer seems entirely shaming to admit to a secret Cath Kidston habit. Taking tea in the stable block of a National Trust property becomes a dignified activity, rather than something to pretend to find a chore. Harris's elegant writing is beautifully served here too by Thames & Hudson, which has done her proud with thick, creamy paper and illustrations placed on facing pages, rather than dropped smudgily into the text or tidied away into an inconvenient centre section. The result is not just an important book but a deeply pleasurable one, too.

Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.