“Loving Faster than Light is a very well-written, insightful examination of one of the essential problems of the history of science—how does elite, esoteric knowledge get read, used, modified, and owned by those outside the professional scientific community? Katy Price focuses on one of the defining scientific ideas of the twentieth century—relativity—and skillfully demonstrates the many genres and styles through which it was adopted and changed. An excellent book that brings together a number of disciplinary approaches.”

“In this witty and often lyrical book, Katy Price recaptures the heady moment when the public first learned of Einstein’s revolutionary vision of the cosmos. She shows how ordinary people made sense of the theory of relativity by thinking through its implications for their own concerns—about social status, money, gender, romance, and more. Price’s literary sophistication offers historians an innovative model for reading popular science. In the tradition of James Secord’s Victorian Sensation, this book breaks new ground for the history of science and its publics.”

“‘The latest craze is Mr. Einstein’s Relativity Theory,’ D. H. Lawrence remarked in 1923; ‘everybody catches fire at the word Relativity.’ Katy Price reveals just how far and how fast—and how strangely—that fire spread through the 1920s and beyond. Examining, in her words, how ‘Einstein’s relativity entered British fiction as a social phenomenon, like shorter dresses or the telephone,’ Loving Faster than Light offers a wide-ranging and fascinating exploration of the popular culture of the time.”

“Wide-ranging. . . . The diversity of genres under consideration is one of the many strengths of Price’s accessible study and aptly demonstrates her assertion that science and culture were in a complex process of negotiation at the beginning of the twentieth century. . . . In addition to its impressive variety of sources, there is much in this study that is worthy of mention. A great deal has been written on the dissemination of relativity theory in the interwar period, but Price has delved into previously untouched archival material to show the extent of its diffusion. Equally rewarding is the brief formal analysis in the chapter on Empson that hints at the absorption of the abstract, technical language of science in conventional literary registers such as poetry. . . . [A]s a critical intervention in the debate about science in culture, Loving Faster than Light is highly recommended.”

“Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us through the ways that readers and writers of newspapers, popular fiction, poems, magazines, and essays translated and incorporated Einsteinian relativity. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe situates this popular engagement with the physical sciences within the political transformations of early twentieth-century Britain, looking at how the scientific and publishing communities attempted (with different levels of success) to use media coverage of relativity to rally the support of a wider reading public. It is a rich study that has much to offer to those interested in the history of science, of literature, and of popular culture, while helpfully complicating all of those categories.”

“That Einstein’s general theory of relativity, confirmed as correct in 1919, had wide cultural reverberations quite apart from its scientific impact is a truism that Katy Price explores with vast learning and style, and occasional humor. . . . Recommended.”

“Throughout Loving Faster than Light, Price conveys her detailed research and thought-provoking ideas and readings with an admirable lightness, even playfulness, of touch and an obvious feel for both the material under discussion and the period in question; this is a well-written and eminently readable book.”

"Price's sophisticated analyses of how ideas from the new physics were put to use within a diverse set of literary endeavors provide a richly annotated excursion into the circulation of scientific knowledge in which authors, texts, and audiences are brought into sharper relief individually even as she begins to examine how they generated collective forms of critique in relation to each other. . . . Price points the way to new questions about the interworkings of science and culture that should be taken seriously by historians of science, whatever their specialization."