Like Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding saw problems inherent in the very existence of an institutionalized modernist revolution, leading to an artless society. There are astonishing similarities between the kind of criticism produced by both writers between 1927 and 1934, with both of them aware the modernist project had succeeded but also intent on identifying where it had gone too far, or not far enough – sometimes in very similar terms. Still, there are differences between them as well, not the least of which was Lewis being two decades older than Riding. While there is evidence that Riding, early in her career, might have envisioned her seamless entry into the modernist ascendancy – with acclaim coming her way from poetic circles orbiting the cultural centre of T. S. Eliot in the early 1920s – she was never as near the centre of high modernism as Lewis, even in the latecomer phase of his career. And although they share a distaste for official literary history, for the group mentality, for the officially sanctioned version of change or revolution, Riding considered Lewis too much of a high modernist himself to see him as a potential ally.

Riding's opposition to the high modernist institution would stem much more from a disapproval of systems and institutions in general than Lewis's disapproval of the single system, the time-mind, instituted by his contemporaries.