The Athenaeum, "A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts," was published weekly in London between 1828 and 1921. John Middleton Murray was appointed as editor in 1919, recruiting Aldous Huxley as his assistant. The magazine featured cultural, scientific, and political commentary, reviews, literary gossip, as well as original poetry and short stories. Contributors included Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, and members of the Bloomsbury set, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry.
Eliot produced essays such as "The Perfect Critic" for the magazine between 1919 and 1920 while working on The Waste Land, quoting writers like Joseph Conrad and James Joyce alongside canonical references. Mansfield was also employed regularly at this time, reviewing the work of contemporaries such as Woolf, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson, as well as collaborating on translations of Chekhov’s letters. The magazine was the first to publish Woolf’s short story "Solid Objects," and to host an early exposition of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.