How is the literary imaginary shaped by an understanding of the materiality of the universe? More specifically, if an author believed the universe was composed of a substance called ether, how did that impact the worldviews represented in their fiction? Today "the ether" refers to a mysterious realm into which car keys disappear and where emails languish, but before Einsteinian relativity became accepted in the 1920s, and for at least a decade afterward, the ether was an established scientific concept that formed the backbone of electromagnetics. Electricity, light, and radio were all believed to be waves carried by the luminiferous (or light-bearing) ether. What began as a mechanical explanation for the propagation of light waves ultimately became the hypothesized foundation for myriad phenomena - even, according to late-nineteenth century universal ether theories, matter. In the British literary imaginary, the ether's role as unifying principle of the physical universe was expanded further: it became the concept through which other forms of connection - media, empire, and Spiritualism - could be represented. This dissertation argues that British authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the ether to represent and conceptualize continuity in narratives of modernity. In theorizing the role of the ether in literature, this dissertation advances an alternative understanding of literary Modernism that is based in mainstream culture. Traditional understandings of Modernism, grounded in elite, "highbrow" texts, characterize it in terms of formal experimentation that responds to the fragmentation, isolation, and rupture of modernity. I approach Modernism instead by using historicism and new materialism to examine fictional representations of the ether in texts that are mostly popular or middlebrow. These texts characterize the experience of modernity in terms of connection: telecommunication, imperialism, and spiritualist connection with the afterlife are figured in terms of the ethereally connected universe. I uncover an understanding of Modernism founded on continuity rather than discontinuity, and that acknowledges the Victorian and the Modern as two ends of a historical continuum rather than distinctly separate periods. Ultimately, this dissertation reconstructs the atmosphere, both literal and cultural, in which Victorian and Modernist literature circulated