I'm going to continue skimming to the end of this after the first couple of hundred pages because my interest in the gossipy subject matter (H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, the Fabians, E. Nesbit, etc.) is very high, but I have the same reservations about this that I did about Julian Barnes' novel Arthur and George a few years back: it seems unforgivably lax to include so much undigested history in a novel. I want to be able to trust whether a detail or incident is in a novel because the author found it significant, rather than just because it happened to be factual, and these novels contain so many lengthy narrative historical sections that I am unable to discern at points whether I'm just reading a biography with a few imaginings to get me over the sticky unknowable bits.

And no, no kind of pomo musing on the slippery nature of truth is going to convince me this is an artistic success. In fact it's sadly boring at times. Even when smutty.

When there were a couple of paragraphs interpolated from Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers I gave an audible sigh of relief to see live literature again.

If you want to read a good novel about creepy turn of the century bohemians and their family complications, go read A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book.