"You'll never guess what we are up to," Vanessa Bell wrote to a friend in 1941. "It starts by the curious fact that Duncan is in touch with a bishop." "Duncan" was Duncan Grant, like Bell a member of Bloomsbury and an exponent of high modernist art. They were "up to" something quite uncharacteristic: designing Christian murals for the parish church of Berwick in East Sussex. Their sketches, Bell reported, met "with approval on the whole, though D's Christ was thought a bit attractive and my Virgin a bit frivolous".

Despite Bell's tone, the story of the Berwick murals is not simply a story about two postimpressionist painters mischievously dabbling in historical pastiche. The murals symbolise the commitment of artistic innovators such as Bell and Grant to the English artistic traditions they are commonly thought to have repudiated and they also demonstrate the extent to which artistic activity in the 1920s, 30s and 40s was rooted in landscape and local experience.

Bell and Grant had to overcome the objections of parishioners (some of whom took them to court over their proposals) but once they had done so they created works in which an entire community was represented. Shepherds and schoolchildren appeared in the murals, alongside soldiers and airmen waiting to depart for war. In 1944, one of the soldiers depicted by Grant was killed near Caen and the windows of the church were blown out so that the paintings, miraculously left intact, "became objects of remembrance".

This episode exemplifies one of the central themes of Alexandra Harris's magnificent Romantic Moderns, which last week won the Guardian first book award. As Harris writes, her book is about "art and place" and tells the story of a "passionate, exuberant return to tradition". The paintings at Berwick church have a place in this story because of the way in which they alienated and absorbed a community before becoming part of an evolving historical record of suffering and loss.

Bell and Grant are just two of the artists who flit through Harris's narrative, undermining easy assumptions about modernist rejections of history and tradition in the process. They appear alongside a phenomenally varied cast of creative individuals. WH Auden, John Betjeman, Benjamin Britten, Elizabeth Bowen, TS Eliot, Roger Fry and Powell and Pressburger are just some of the characters Harris writes about, animating a scholarly thesis about the way in which canons are formed and re-formed by new generations of artists and thinkers.

Two figures stand out from the crowd. The first is John Piper, whose allegiance to materiality, landscape and ancient churches grew out of an early preoccupation with abstraction. Piper came to believe that pure abstraction was "undernourished" and argued that "it should at least be allowed to feed on a bare beach with tins and broken bottles". Harris interprets his paintings sensitively and carefully and here, as elsewhere, is well-served by her publisher's commitment to her work, as images under discussion appear beautifully reproduced on facing pages, allowing one to read and see simultaneously.

The second individual who receives sustained attention is Virginia Woolf. Harris's reading of Woolf's work, particularly Between the Acts, forms the basis of some of the most striking passages. Between the Acts is a novel about how art merges into life and about how England and the English are fit subjects for the modern Romantic artist. Harris returns to the novel and to Woolf's other work throughout her book, displaying impressive versatility as she moves seamlessly through discussions of literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, music and film.

Woolf and Piper both merit a place in Harris's subtitle. Yet despite this emphasis, Romantic Moderns is not really a book about individuals. It is emphatically a book about people: about how we live, how we decorate our homes, gardens and tea tables, about how we respond to the world around us and about how we are shaped by history and culture. But it is also, in the best sense, a book about ideas and perhaps as a result, initially, its structure feels disorientatingly loose. That feeling recedes as Harris slowly unfolds her mass of anecdote and detail, revealing a rhythmic coherence underpinning her richly complicated argument.

Instead of describing a series of discrete historical moments, she divides her narrative thematically, focusing initially on different aspects of the "return to tradition" and then on the constituent elements of contemporary English life. So in the first part of the book she shows how the Romantic moderns turned to Georgian architecture for inspiration, reproducing its symmetry and clean lines in art forms ranging from the essay to the photograph. She reveals how artists who rejected ornament and ostentation nevertheless drew on their cluttered Victorian childhoods as they shaped their aesthetic response to the world. And she demonstrates that history, represented by the pageant of Between the Acts, informed even the work of those who claimed to reject their cultural inheritance. She then shifts her attention to symbols of English life: churches, villages, gardens and houses. The last of these comes to be epitomised by Daphne du Maurier's Manderley, in a wonderfully vibrant reading of Rebecca.

Romantic Moderns is ultimately a book about subjectivity, about the way in which artists and thinkers of all kinds respond to their peers, heritage and environment. It is only at the very end that Harris permits her own artistic sensibility to come to the fore, as she briefly alludes to the places that have sparked her imagination. Those places may have changed since they were lived in and visited by Harris's subjects, but her experience shows that they nevertheless retain their capacity to provoke and inspire. It is on this note, quoting a 1937 observation by John Piper, that Romantic Moderns concludes: "The tradition, once more, has to stretch."

Daisy Hay is the author of Young Romantics (Bloomsbury)

The modernism we know about, or think we do, was fierce and sharp-edged, all the better to scythe down the past and start all over again. During the interwar period, making things new became the mantra. History was a jumbled lumber-room of habits and beliefs that we would all do much better without: it had led, after all, to the carnage of the trenches. All those bits and pieces from previous centuries  the clutter, the junk, the sheer bulk of countless pointless objects  needed to be swept away. Homes, in the words of Le Corbusier, were to become "machines for living", complete with kitchenettes and pull-down beds. And instead of watercolour landscapes and ancestral portraits on the walls, there would be an art composed of white circles etched upon white squares floating upon white paper. If there were to be any colour in this weightless world, it was to be found checked within Mondrian's strict grids.

This, though, wasn't the only modernism in town. In this brilliant book, longlisted for the Guardian first book award, Alexandra Harris sets out to show that English culture between the wars contained another strand, one she calls romantic modernism. Whereas high modernism wanted to lay waste to the material past in order to re-fashion it upon rational lines, romantic modernists had a soft spot for what had gone before. They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England's crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.

We have, of course, always known about this strand of mid-20th-century culture. John Betjeman and his church crawls, Beverley Nichols and his cottage garden, Edith Sitwell and her dressing-up box hardly count as lost objects. But at best these figures have tended to seem like extra limbs, dangling untidily from the main narrative of English culture between the wars. And at worst they have appeared just plain embarrassing, a reminder that some writers and painters simply failed to get with the programme (or, worse, didn't realise there was a programme in the first place). One of the tasks Harris sets herself is to weave these lost modernists back into the main weft of British culture, rescuing them from their status as lovable eccentrics or  worse still  "national treasures", granting them instead the dignity of an identity as self-conscious intellectuals trying to make sense of difficult times.

Harris's second, and trickier, task is to show how many of the people whose high modernist credentials have always seemed impeccable were actually deeply drawn to the impure forms of the past. Her emblematic anecdote concerns Le Corbusier dining at the Reform Club. At one moment, perhaps when he thought no one was looking, the great moderniser was spotted sensuously fingering the Victorian mouldings of the club's faux Roman-Renaissance columns. The man who wanted the thinking classes to live in white boxes turned out to have a fondness for curls and curves after all.

Not all of Harris's subjects are quite so obliging when it comes to furnishing this kind of shorthand. Mostly, she is obliged to track her romantic modernists stealthily, noticing a glint in their eye when they make a detour to visit Stonehenge, read an Anglo-Saxon poem or express a sneaking regard for the folk tunes that Cecil Sharp had rescued from oblivion. Others, such as Cecil Beaton, require a more probing approach. In a particularly fine section, Harris describes how the photographer managed to fashion himself simultaneously as a silver-suited futurist and an 18th-century squire. In his decayed Wiltshire manor house, Beaton mocked up a Georgian fantasia by making over junk shop furniture with swags of cheap velvet. Weekend guests, including David Cecil and Augustus John, shuffled their identities in the ormolu mirrors and posed for period tableaux. History became something that could be invented rather than inherited, and was all the better for it.

Beaton is one of the many bit players who do sterling work supporting Harris's thesis. There are, nonetheless, two figures whose journeys are considered important enough to find their way into her book's subtitle: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Piper is best remembered these days for his love affair with England's ancient churches. Harris, though, reminds us that he started in a different place entirely. In the early 30s he was an abstract artist with a capital A, balancing pure form and colour with the best of them. As a true believer in Roger Fry's progressive manifesto, Piper looked to Europe for inspiration, imbibing and producing an art that determinedly floated above national boundaries. His future wife Myfanwy even edited Axis, the house journal for the aesthetic avant garde.

But something happened to Piper in 1934  around the same time that Betjeman stopped pretending to be keen on new buildings. Having studied photographs of the English landscape taken from the air, he started to see and feel in three dimensions. Using collage, he built up his canvases with bits of torn newspaper and scrunched doilies. Blotting paper and music manuscripts were scribbled over with ink and gouache to recreate the untidy shorelines of Kent and Sussex. Brooding on what he had made, Piper came to the ringing conclusion that pure abstraction was "undernourished". What was needed was a return to representation, not of the plodding weekend-painter variety, but in a way that acknowledged the presence of what he famously described as "the tree in the field". From this point, Piper's work turned to new and nourishing directions. His painterly investigations of Oxfordshire's farm buildings and Wales's Georgian ruins involved mapping a strikingly modern cubist sensibility on to the much older romantic tradition of Gilpin and Girtin. The result was deep pleasure for both eye and soul.

As Piper's love of lichen and leaf-filtered light suggests, romantic modernism was happiest in the country. If a Domesday Book had been compiled in the late 30s, recording the inhabitants of villages and outlying farms, it would include most of the main figures of English arts and letters: the Woolfs in Rodmell, the Pipers at Fawley Bottom, EM Forster in Abinger, Stanley Spencer at Cookham, Beverley Nichols at Glatton. True, TS Eliot stayed mainly in the city, but from his Faber office he commissioned, improbable though it sounds, books on soil management. For while high modernism hung out in smoky jazz bars, romantic modernism tended to pile on the jumpers and sit round the kitchen table, scoffing a delicious stew composed of ingredients foraged from the hedgerows. When it took to the roads it did so with a well-thumbed Victorian gazetteer in the glove compartment or perhaps an edition of Gilbert White's Selborne or Thomas Bewick's British Birds. Not that it rejected all evidence of modernity. When new guides to the English landscape were called for, it seemed only right and proper that they should be sponsored by Shell-Mex. In yet another twist, Vanessa Bell, once the doyenne of French-facing art, undertook to paint the Sussex village of Alfriston for one of the petroleum megalith's signature posters.

It would be impossible to over-emphasise what a clever book Romantic Moderns is. It is a kind one too, showing tactful generosity towards people and places, sights and sounds, that have tended to get written off as embarrassing or just plain wrong. Never has this seemed more important than now, as we work through our own complicated millennial feelings about the romance of the past. Thanks to Harris it no longer seems entirely shaming to admit to a secret Cath Kidston habit. Taking tea in the stable block of a National Trust property becomes a dignified activity, rather than something to pretend to find a chore. Harris's elegant writing is beautifully served here too by Thames & Hudson, which has done her proud with thick, creamy paper and illustrations placed on facing pages, rather than dropped smudgily into the text or tidied away into an inconvenient centre section. The result is not just an important book but a deeply pleasurable one, too.

Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.