In 1929 the poets Robert Graves and Laura Riding settled in the village of Deià in Mallorca, where they became the centre of a circle of like-minded friends – some correspondents, some visitors, and some who came to live there – that included James Reeves, Honor Wyatt, Gordon Glover, Norman Cameron, Len Lye, T. S. Matthews, John Aldridge, Eirlys Roberts, and Jacob Bronowski.
[3][4] Epilogue was intended as a twice-yearly periodical, though the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the editors' consequent move to London in August 1936 disrupted its publication schedule.
It consisted of critical and polemic essays written in plain, unliterary English on topics which ranged from religion and philosophy to language, poetry, drama, film and photography, among other subjects.
[14] Graves, Riding, "Vara", Wyatt, Reeves and Hutchinson were all credited, as were four new contributors: Alan Hodge, Kenneth Allott, Katharine Burdekin, and Gordon Glover.
[19] Less than a hundred replies were received, and few of those offered much encouragement to Riding's belief, expressed in the letter, that she herself together with a small number of "inside people" could by their example and influence save the world.
[22][23] Intended to be the fourth and last volume of Epilogue, it finally, after some difficulty in finding a publisher, appeared in November 1938 under the imprint of Chatto & Windus as The World and Ourselves by Laura Riding.
[28] Thereafter, as Graves recalled a few years later, Epilogue "commanded increasing inattention in literary circles",[29] though in the fraught atmosphere prevailing in Britain during the final few months before World War II The World and Ourselves was given serious consideration by reviewers in The Times Literary Supplement, The Bookseller (which compared it to Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means), and Time and Tide.
[31] However, Martin Seymour-Smith, Graves's friend and biographer, wrote that it was characterised by acute and intelligent criticism, typical of the work's presiding spirit, Laura Riding, and also by severity, dogmatism, unfriendliness, and lack of empathy.