Individual Authors

Notes on biography, major works, and criticism

Each entry is divided into three sections:

The main works of the important authors in this period are all available in reliable paperback editions—Penguin, Fontana, World’s Classics, Everyman, Norton (US), etc. Scholarly editions exist for some works (e.g. the ‘Abinger’ edition of E. M. Forster, ed. by O. Stallybrass, the Clarendon Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. by J. Grindle and S. Gatrell) and others are planned. Details of collected editions and, where they existed at the time of publication, scholarly editions can be found in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and the Bateson and Meserole Guide (see (vi) on p. 243). The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence (general editors J. T. Boulton and Warren Roberts), of which the first volume appeared in 1979, is a rather special case. The editors claim that earlier editions are so corrupt that the new edition is the only authentic text and hence establishes a claim to copyright. The correctness of this may be disputed; in this book I quote from earlier editions.

A series of studies which can be thoroughly recommended is the Critical Heritage, volumes of which deal with most of the writers whom I discuss. These reprint a large selection of contemporary reviews and also summarize the development of the critical debate up to the present. The volumes are, inevitably, of unequal value (in this period the Conrad volume by Norman Sherry is very good and the Kipling by Roger Lancelyn Green a good deal less satisfactory) but the general level is high and most of the editors are scrupulously fair in their summaries of critical opinions.

BENNETT, (Enoch) Arnold (1867–1931), son of a solicitor, was born at Hanley in the Potteries, one of the Five Towns of his fiction. He left Newcastle under Lyme Middle School at sixteen to work in his father’s office, but went to work for a firm of solicitors in London in 1888. In 1893 he became assistant editor of Woman and was its editor from 1896 to 1900. His first novel was A Man from the North (1898) and in the same year he published fournalism for Women: A Practical Guide. Thereafter he produced over forty novels and volumes of stories, some pot-boilers and some masterpieces, an immense amount of journalism and criticism of equally varying quality, and a considerable number of plays. The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), one of the pot-boilers, was followed by his first serious treatment of the inhabitants of the Potteries, Anna of the Five Towns (1902). In 1903 he moved to France where he lived in Paris and later in Fontainebleau until 1912. In 1907 he married Marguerite Soulié. During this period he produced a great deal of fiction, including Teresa of Watling Street (1904), Sacred and Profane Love (1905), Whom God Hath foined (1906), Buried Alive (1908), Helen with the High Hand (1910), and The Card (1911), three significant volumes of short stories, Tales of the Five Towns (1905), The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (1907), and The Matador of the Five Towns (1912), and two of his masterpieces, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910). The latter, which contains a good deal of autobiographical material, especially about his relationship with his father, forms part of the trilogy which was completed by Hilda Lessways (1911) and These Twain (1915). He had a very wide circle of friends both in France and England and generously encouraged many young writers. His literary journalism, unabashedly popular in form - Literary Taste: How to Form it (1909) is a typical title - is often shrewd and perceptive. During the Great War he served on various official bodies concerned with propaganda; his non-fictional work of the time reflects this: Liberty! A Statement of the British Case (1914) and Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front (1915); a novel, The Pretty Lady (1918) also draws on his wartime work and experiences. He separated from his wife in 1921 and in 1922 formed an attachment with Dorothy Cheston, by whom he had a daughter in 1926. The novels of the last decade of his life include Mr Prohack (1922), Lord Raingo (1926), and Imperial Palace (1930), in which he gives free rein to his fascination with the organization of large hotels; but by general consent the best work of this period is his study of a miser, Riceyman Steps (1923).

BOWEN, Elizabeth (1899–1973), born in Dublin of a landowning Irish family; Bowen’s Court (1942) is a history of her family and of the house which she inherited. She moved to England in 1918 and in 1923 married Alan Charles Cameron and lived thereafter in Oxford and, later, Thame. Her earlier—and by general consent best—novels are usually concerned with the plights of children or young women in complex emotional situations which are not of their own making: The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935), and The Death of the Heart (1938). The novelists with whom she has most often been compared are Jane Austen and Henry James. During the Second World War she worked in London for the Ministry of Information and The Heat of the Day (1949) is set in wartime London and, dealing with treason, is notably more dramatic than her previous work. Her later novels are A World of Love (1955), The Little Girls (1964), and Eva Trout (1968). She also wrote many short stories, including some on the supernatural; she collected them in several volumes, including Joining Charles (1929), Look at all those Roses (1941), The Demon Lover (1945). These have been gathered together as The Collected Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1981).

BUCHAN, John (1875–1940), the son of a Free Kirk minister, was born at Peebles and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School, Glasgow, the University of Glasgow, and Brasenose College, Oxford. Studied law, acted as Lord Milner’s secretary in South Africa 1901—3, returned to the law but left it to enter publishing. In 1906 married Susan Grosvenor. Published volumes of essays and sundry historical and romantic novels but achieved his first major success with The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), a thriller which was followed by a succession of others, including Greenmantle (1916), Mr Standfast (1919), Huntingtower (1922), The Three Hostages (1924), John Macnab (1925), and The Courts of the Morning (1929) as well as historical novels, Midwinter (1923), Witch Wood (1927), The Blanket of the Dark (1931), biographies, Montrose (1928; a revision of an earlier version of 1913), Sir Walter Scott (1932), Oliver Cromwell (1934), and an autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door (1940). He worked in intelligence and propaganda during the Great War, was elected as Conservative MP for the Scottish Universities in 1927 and was appointed Governor-General of Canada in 1935, becoming Lord Tweedsmuir.

CARY, (Arthur) Joyce (1888–1957), of Anglo-Irish extraction, was educated at Clifton and - after a time studying art in Paris and Edinburgh - Oxford. In 1912 he fought for the Montenegrins against the Turks in the Balkans, an experience described in Memoir of the Bobotes (1964 posth.) He joined the Nigerian Political Service in 1913, fought in the Cameroon campaign from 1915 to 1916, was wounded and, while on leave in England married Gertrude Ogilvie, by whom he had four sons. He returned to Nigeria but retired in 1916 and devoted himself thereafter to writing. His first books deal with West Africa: Aissa Saved (1932), An American Visitor (1933), The African Witch (1936), and Mister Johnson (1939). As well as several single novels he wrote two trilogies: the first, Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse’s Mouth (1944) is concerned largely with art and the nature of the artist; the second, Prisoner of Grace (1952), Except the Lord (1953) and Not Honour More (1955) is centred on politics and religion.

COMPTON-BURNETT, Ivy (1892–1969), was born at Pinner, Middlesex, one of twelve children (by two wives) of a doctor. She was educated at Royal Holloway College and took a degree in classics. Her first novel, Dolores (1911), was later regretted by her. In 1919 she began sharing a flat in London with Margaret Jourdain with whom she continued to live until the latter’s death in 1951. Pastors and Masters (1925) was the first novel in her intensely idiosyncratic style, and this was followed by seventeen others, including Men and Wives (1931), More Women than Men (1933), A Family and a Fortune (1939), Parents and Children (1941), Manservant and Maidservant (1947), Mother and Son (1944), and - her last - A God and his Gifts (1963). She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1967.

CONRAD, Joseph (1857–1924) born as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski at Berdiczew in the Polish Ukraine, at that time part of Russia, the son of Apollo and Ewa (née Bobrowska), members of the minor Polish nobility. His father took part in a conspiracy against the Russian rulers and he and his wife were exiled to northern Russia in 1862. Ewa died in 1865 and Apollo was reprieved in 1868, but died in 1869. Thereafter Joseph Conrad was in the charge of his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski. He went to Marseilles in 1874 and served in the French merchant marine, but, after a bungled attempt at suicide, shipped in a British vessel and first set foot in England in 1878. In 1886 he acquired his certificate as a master mariner and in the same year took British nationality. During his years at sea, which lasted until 1894, he sailed mostly in Eastern waters, though in 1890 he served in a river steamer on the Congo. His first two novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), drew on his experience in Eastern seas. He married Jessie George, by whom he had two sons, in 1896. In 1898 he published The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ - a Tale of the Sea and a collection of stories mostly about the East, Tales of Unrest. In 1899 he wrote ‘Heart of Darkness’ (published in a volume, Youth and Other Stories in 1902, the title story dealing with one of his early voyages) and this was followed by Lord Jim (1900). At this time he was seeing a good deal of Ford Madox Ford, with whom he collaborated in The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). Nostromo—a Tale of the Seaboard, a story of revolution in South America, for some details of which he was indebted to another friend, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, appeared in 1904 and this was followed by two other political novels, The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). At this period of his life he also collected two volumes of short stories, A Set of Six (1908) and (Twixt Land and Sea’(1912), which contains the highly regarded ‘The Secret Sharer’, and two volumes of reminiscences, The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and Some Reminiscences—later retitled A Personal Record—(1912). He achieved his first popular success with Chance (1913). He visited Poland with his family in 1914 and was caught there by the outbreak of the Great War, but made his way back to England by November 1914. Within the Tides - Tales and Victory appeared in 1915 and The Shadow Line, in which he reverts once more to his early days as ship’s captain, in 1917. Throughout this period he was often nearly crippled with rheumatism and his wife, also, suffered badly from a series of operations on her hip. He was also the victim throughout most of his life of depressive states. The Arrow of Gold (1919) draws on a highly romanticized version of his time in Marseilles, The Rescue (1920) is a novel which he had started in 1896 and abandoned, and The Rover (1923) was the last novel. The unfinished Suspense came out after his death in 1924.

FIRBANK, (Arthur Annesley) Ronald (1886–1926), educated at Uppingham School, by a private tutor, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he took no degree but was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He was of a delicate constitution, travelled widely, and early acquired a reputation as an aesthete. His highly mannered novels include Valmouth (1919), The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), Prancing Nigger (1924), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).

FORD, Ford Madox (1873–1939); works before 1923 were signed Ford Madox Hueffer; his full name was Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer. His first published work was a fairy story, The Brown Owl (1892), illustrated by his grandfather, the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. He became a Roman Catholic in 1892 and married Elsie Martindale in 1894 (they separated in 1909). He collaborated with Conrad in The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). He produced a great deal of literary journalism, criticism, memoirs, and over thirty works of fiction; his reputation as a novelist rests upon The Good Soldier (1915) and a tetralogy Parade’s End centring on the Great War (in which he served in the trenches and was gassed) and the break-up of society: Some Do Not. (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928). He founded and edited The English Review for fifteen months from December 1908, where he was the first to publish work by D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis as well as contributions from James, Bennett, Hardy, and Yeats; after the war he lived in France and America where he edited The Transatlantic Review in 1924. His last book was The March of Literature from Confucius to Modern Times (1938).

FORSTER, Edward Morgan (1879–1970), the son of an architect who died when his son was a few months old, leaving him to be brought up by his mother. He suffered a good deal when he left this sheltered environment first for a prep school and then for Tonbridge School. He went up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1897 and the sense of liberation there is reflected in The Longest Journey (1907) which also gives an unflattering picture of a public school based on Tonbridge. A legacy from his aunt allowed him to travel in Greece and Italy. He commemorated her and her membership of the evangelical Clapham Sect in Marianne Thornton 1797–1887 (1956). His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), contrasts the narrow snobbery of middle-class England with the liberation of Italy, as does A Room with a View (1908). Howards End (1910) is a more ambitious novel and he published a volume of short, often fanciful stories The Celestial Omnibus (1911). In 1913 and 1914 he wrote Maurice, a homosexual love story, which was published posthumously in 1971 and began writing overtly erotic homosexual stories, some of which, together with some later ones, were also published posthumously as The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972). From 1915 to 1919 he lived in Alexandria, working for the Red Cross, an experience which found expression in Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922) and a volume of essays, Pharos and Pharillon (1923). He was for a short time literary editor of the Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, and in 1921 he went to India, which he had visited in 1912, as secretary to the Maharajah of the small State of Dewas Senior; his account of this is given in The Hill of Devi (1953), but the most important outcome of his Indian experience was the novel, A Passage to India (1924). This, apart from a collection of stories, The Eternal Moment (1928), was the last fiction published in his lifetime. His Clark lectures at Cambridge were published as Aspects of the Novel (1927) and he wrote a biography, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934), of the don whom he had known at King’s, and a very large number of essays, collected in Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). In the latter part of his life he worked for many liberal causes. He was President of the Council for Civil Liberties, President of the Humanist Society, witness for the defence in the Lady Chatterley trial. He refused a knighthood, was made a Companion of Honour in 1953 and was awarded the OM on his ninetieth birthday. In 1946 he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at King’s College and spent most of his time thereafter in Cambridge, very accessible and very revered.

GALSWORTHY, John (1897–1933), educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, called to the Bar in 1890 but practised very little. He published a number of early novels under the pseudonym ‘John Sinjohn’. Married Ada, wife of his cousin, in 1905, having been her lover since 1895. The Man of Property (1906) was the first novel in the series of novels about the Forsyte family, which finally grew to three trilogies, of which the first, The Forsyte Saga (The Man of Property, In Chancery (1920), To Let (1921) plus two interludes) established his reputation. He was also a prolific dramatist (The Silver Box (1906), Strife (1909), The Skin Game (1920), and Loyalties (1922) are probably the best known). Nobel Prize for Literature 1932.

GIBBON, Lewis Grassic (pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, 1901–35), born in Aberdeenshire and brought up on farms in that region. Worked as a local journalist and then as clerk in the Army, 1918—22, and the Royal Air Force, 1923—29. Thereafter he devoted himself to writing, publishing many works on archaeology and exploration and a biography, Spartacus (1933) under his own name. His reputation rests on the trilogy A Scots Quair, published under his pseudonym - Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934) in which, with a highly original use of the Scots language of his birthplace, he follows the life of a crofter’s daughter from childhood to old age and the impact of war, poverty, and political beliefs.

GREEN, Henry (pseudonym of Henry Yorke: 1905–73), began his first novel, Blindness (1926), while still at school at Eton; it was published when he was at Oxford. He worked in the family business in Birmingham, the scene of Living (1929). He married the Hon. Mary Adelaide Biddulph in 1929. In 1939 he published Party Going and an interim autobiography, Pack My Bag, in 1940. By this time he was a fireman in the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, an organization which figures in Caught (1943). After the war he continued his career in industry, becoming the managing director of the family business, while writing Loving (1945), Back (1946), Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952). The last two consist almost entirely of dialogue, a subject about which he spoke in two broadcast talks in 1950 and 1951, two of the rare occasions when he gave any clues to his enigmatic novels. His description of his favourite activity was ‘romancing over a bottle to a good band’.

GREENE, Graham (born 1904) was educated at Berkhamstead School, of which his father was headmaster, and Balliol College, Oxford. He worked for The Times and as a film critic. In 1926 he entered the Roman Catholic Church and in 1927 married Vivien Dayrell-Browning, by whom he had one son and one daughter. His first novel was The Man Within (1929) and this was followed by The Name of Action (1930), Rumour at Nightfall(1931), and his first success, Stamboul Train (1932), which is described on the title page as ‘an entertainment’. A number of his succeeding works are so characterized, though the distinction between novel and entertainment is not always clear: It’s a Battlefield (1934), England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936), Brighton Rock (1938). He travelled widely and wrote Journey Without Maps (1936) about Liberia and The Lawless Roads (1939) about Mexico. The Power and the Glory (1940) draws in part on his experiences in Mexico. He served, mostly in West Africa, in the Foreign Office 1941–44. His later novels include The Ministry of Fear (1943), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1966), The Honorary Consul (1973), and The Human Factor (1978). He has also written a number of plays, short stories, essays, and autobiographical works.

HARDY, Thomas (1840–1928), the son of a stonemason, was born near Dorchester and was educated at the school there. Articled, 1856–62, to John Hicks, a Dorchester architect. Worked 1826–67 in London for Arthur Blomfield on church design and restoration. At this time he read widely, began to write poetry, and published a sketch ‘How I Built Myself a House’ in 1865 in Chamber’s Journal. He returned to work with Hicks in Dorchester. In 1868 he unsuccessfully submitted a first novel The Poor Man and the Lady, but the publisher’s reader, Meredith, encouraged him to continue writing. His first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), was followed by the first ‘Wessex’ novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). With A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) he began for financial reasons the practice of serial publication (often making changes for volume publication), and he continued so with the very successful Far From the Madding Crowd (1874). By this time he had abandoned architecture for a career as a novelist; he married Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874. For the next two decades he produced a succession of novels and volumes of short stories centring on Wessex, including The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet Major (1880), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Wessex Tales (1888), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896). Thereafter, moved partly by hostile reviews and partly perhaps by a sense of having written himself out as a novelist, he devoted himself to writing poetry, though a few stories and a novel written earlier, The Well-Beloved (1897), appeared after this decision. He had lived in London from 1878 to 1882 and moved in literary circles, but returned to Dorset and made his last move in 1885 into Max Gate, a house in Dorchester which he designed himself. His first volume of poems was Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898) and this was followed by nine other volumes which include nearly one thousand poems, as well as a vast poetic drama, The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars (3 vols 1903–8). His wife died in 1912 and his mingled grief and guilt for unkindness are superbly displayed in the twenty-one ‘Poems of 1912–13’ which appeared in the volume Satires of Circumstance (1914). He married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale, in 1914. He was the recipient of many honours, including the OM in 1910, though he refused a knighthood.

HUXLEY, Aldous Leonard (1894–1963), was the grandson of the great biologist T. H. Huxley and his mother was Matthew Arnold’s niece. Educated at Eton and Balliol; an eye disorder made him give up medical studies and he took a degree in English. He married Maria Nys in 1919. After four volumes of verse he published a volume of short stories, Limbo (1920), and his first novel Crome Yellow (1921) which established his reputation as a witty novelist of ideas. There followed further volumes of stories, Mortal Coils (1922), Little Mexican and other Stories (1924), Two or Three Graces(1926), Brief Candles (1930) and novels, Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), Point Counterpoint (1928), the dystopia, Brave New World(1932), and Eyeless in Gaza (1936). He produced further volumes of poetry and collections of essays of which the most notable is Ends and Means (1937). In his early work he combined wit with increasingly serious concern for moral and political issues and was prominent as a pacifist. In 1937 he moved to California. His later novels are more obviously sombre, After Many a Summer (1939), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), Ape and Essence (1948), and he became increasingly interested in mystical and quasi-mystical experiences; The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) deal with psychedelic experiences caused by hallucinatory drugs. After the death of his wife in 1955 he married Laura Archera in 1956. His Collected Short Stories appeared in 1957 and in Island (1962) he produced a Utopia of a rather different kind from Brave New World.

JAMES, Henry (1843–1916) was born in New York City, son of Henry James Sr, a Swedenborgian who arranged unconventional educations for his children, and brother of the philosopher William James. He travelled a great deal in Europe as a boy. Studied briefly at Harvard Law School before devoting himself for life to the profession of writing. He lived mostly in Europe from 1872 to 1876 and met many of the leading writers, including Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Turgenev; he settled in London in 1876 where he was an insatiable diner out. In 1896 he moved to Rye, where one of his neighbours was Conrad. He was an immensely productive writer and produced over one hundred short stories and more than thirty novels (of which some might be classified as contes while others are very long), several plays (whose lack of success was a grief to him), many essays, books of travel, and reviews. The first novel of note was Roderick Hudson (1875), the first volume of short stories, A Passionate Pilgrim, appeared in the same year, and they were followed by The American (1877) and The Europeans (1878). Daisy Miller (1879), a short ‘Study’, established his reputation. Notable among his early riovels are Washington Square (1881), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Princess Casamassima (1886). During this period he was writing a very large number of short stories, a fine critical study, Hawthorne (1879), Portraits of Places (1883) and A Little Tour of France (1884) and The Art of Fiction (1885). His middle period, in which he turns away from the theme of the conflict between the values of America and those of England which dominate the earlier work, is marked by The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), and The Awkward Age (1899). His last three completed novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), represent for many of his admirers his ‘major phase’ and certainly show many of the characteristic features of his fiction in their most developed form. He revised his novels between 1907 and 1909 for the collected ‘New York’ edition, making substantial alterations to some of the earlier ones, and wrote prefaces to them which have been collected as The Art of the Novel (edited by R. P. Blackmur, 1935). This, together with his other critical studies, have been extremely influential for later critical thinking. He became a naturalized British subject in 1915 and was awarded the OM one month before his death.

JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius (1882–1941), born in Dublin, the son of an eloquent and convivial failure and his long-suffering wife. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College, the Jesuit Belvedere College, and University College, Dublin. His first publication was ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’ in The Fortnightly Review (1900). He rejected the idea of entering the priesthood and, becoming progressively alienated from Roman Catholicism and nationalist ideas, went to Paris to study medicine. He returned to Ireland when his mother became fatally ill in 1903. In 1904 he published poems in The Saturday Review and stories (which later appeared in revised form in Dubliners) in The Irish Homestead, lived briefly in a Martello tower at Sandycove with Oliver St John Gogarty while teaching at Dalkey, had some success as a singer, and began work on a novel, Stephen Hero, which was to be transformed into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of which a surviving fragment was published in 1944. In October 1904 he went abroad with Nora Barnacle, with whom he lived for the rest of his life and whom he married in 1931, and settled in Trieste where he earned his living teaching English. Chamber Music, a volume of poems, was published in 1907 and a satirical broadside poem, Gas from a Burner, in 1912. Dubliners (1914) was only published after great problems with publishers, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared serially in The Egoist in 1914–15 and in volume form in 1916; a play, Exiles, was published in 1918 and was first performed in a German translation in Munich in 1919. During the Great War Joyce and his wife with their children, Giorgio and Lucia, were in Zurich; after the war they returned to Trieste but moved in 1920 to Paris. Ulysses, on which Joyce had been working since 1914, began to be published serially from 1918 in the American Little Review but was halted in the middle of the fourteenth section as the result of a prosecution for obscenity. It appeared in full in Paris in 1922. An unauthorized and mutilated version was published in New York in 1929; since the book had been banned in the USA Joyce had no copyright. A protest was signed by a dazzling collection of writers as varied as Bennett, Eliot, Forster, Lawrence, Mann, Pirandello, Woolf, and Yeats. In 1933 the ban was lifted in the USA and Ulysses was published therein 1934. An English edition followed in 1936. A thoroughly revised edition, taking account of scholarly work by H. W. Gabler and others, appeared in 1986. There was a further volume of poems, Pomes penyeach (1927), but the main work of the remainder of Joyce’s life was Finnegans Wake (1939). Sections of this appeared at various times over a decade: Work in Progress; volume 1, (1928), Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928), Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (1929), Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930) and Storiella as she is syung (1937). Throughout the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Joyce suffered from an extremely painful disease of the eye which necessitated a number of operations and he was also distressed by the increasing mental illness of his daughter. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War he moved with his family to Zurich where he died.

KIPLING, Rudyard (1865–1936), born in Bombay, son of Lockwood Kipling who was professor in a school of art there. After five happy years he was sent to England where he was made intensely miserable by the couple who looked after him. He deals with this experience in the story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ (1888) and later in his autobiography Something of Myself (published posthumously, 1937). Educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho!, about which he wrote in Stalky and Co. (1899). In 1882 he returned to India and worked as a journalist first in Lahore on the Civil and Military Gazette and then in Allahabad on the Pioneer. Most of the poems collected in Departmental Ditties (1886) and the short stories in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) were first published in these newspapers. When he came to England in 1889 he was already known as a writer on exotic and imperial themes. His first novel, The Light That Failed, appeared in 1890, but his talents were more strikingly displayed in short stories: Soldiers Three (1890), Wee Willie Winkie (1890), and Life’s Handicap (1891). In 1892 he married Caroline Balestier, an American from Vermont, and he moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1892 and planned to settle there. To this period belong a volume of stories, Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894), and The Second Jungle Book (1895). His life in Vermont was disrupted by a quarrel with his brother-in-law and he returned to England. He had published Barrack-Room Ballads in 1892 and a volume of poems, The Seven Seas, followed in 1896; there was some talk on the death of Tennyson of making him Poet Laureate but he would probably have refused; later in life he certainly refused offers of titles and the OM. The year 1898 saw the publication of The Day’s Work, the last volume of stories largely about India. The culmination of his writing about India is marked by Kim (1901). A close association with Cecil Rhodes confirmed his belief in the British Empire and in the Boer War he played a public role as propagandist, as can clearly be seen in the stories in Traffics and Discoveries (1904). In 1902 he moved to ‘Bateman’s’ in Sussex and that county came to have a particular importance for him as a representation of a continuity with the past. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907. His son was killed in the battle of Loos in 1915. Many of the stories in A Diversity of Creatures (1917), Debits and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932) deal with grief, shell-shock and depressive states and suggest little comfort but comradeship and endurance. Kipling died in 1936 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His pall-bearers included the Prime Minister, an admiral, a general and the Master of a Cambridge College, though by this time he had come in literary circles to seem a representative of an age that was past.

LAWRENCE, David Herbert (1885–1930), was born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal-miner. Educated at Nottingham High School; worked briefly as a clerk and then as a pupil teacher in Eastwood and Ilkeston. Two-year teacher training course at University College, Nottingham, 1906–8, followed by schoolteaching in Croydon until 1912. During this period he ended his long love-affair with Jessie Chambers, his mother died, and he had poems and short stories published in the English Review; his first novel, The White Peacock, appeared in 1911. In 1912 he met Frieda (née von Richthofen), wife of Professor Ernest Weekley, and eloped with her (they married after her divorce in 1914); by this time he had finished writing The Trespasser (1912) and Sons and Lovers (1913). Thereafter, except for a period during and immediately after the war (when he met and argued with members of the Bloomsbury Group and other intellectual luminaries) he lived abroad. Despite poor health (he suffered for many years from the tuberculosis which eventually killed him) he was immensely energetic, producing many volumes of poetry: Collected Poems (2 vols, 1928), Pansies (1929); short stories: The Prussian Officer (1914), England, My England (1922), The Woman Who Rode Away (1928); books of travel: Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927); plays: The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914), Touch and Go (1920); critical and polemical studies: Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Studies in Classic American Literature (1923); and translations: Mastro-Don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga (1923), The Story of Doctor Manente by A. F. Grazzini (1929), as well as ten novels. The Rainbow (1915) produced his first brush with censorship; it was suppressed after two months and only issued in an unexpurgated form in America in 1924 and in England in 1926; its sequel, Women in Love, was privately printed in New York in 1920 (English edition 1921). After the war he lived in Italy where he wrote The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron’s Rod (1922). A short stay in Australia produced Kangaroo (1923). From 1922 to 1925 he lived mainly in New Mexico and The Plumed Serpent (1926) is concerned with the revival of the old Mexican religion. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in Florence in 1928; imported copies were seized by the police along with copies of a volume of poems, Pansies (1929), and later in the year an exhibition of his paintings was also raided. Though dying, he continued writing energetic polemic, especially concerned with the moral dishonesty of censorship: Pornography and Obscenity (1929). A good deal of his work was collected and published posthumously: Phoenix I (1936) and Phoenix II (1968) and most recently a novel, Mr. Noon (1984), an amalgam of two stories, one of which is an autobiographical account of Lawrence’s elopement with Frieda.

LEWIS, (Percy) Wyndham (1884–1957) was born on his father’s yacht off the coast of the USA, educated at Rugby School and the Slade School of Art. He was a painter, critic, and propagandist for his ideas about art as well as a novelist. For much of his life was at the centre of artistic warfare; with Ezra Pound he edited Blast, two numbers of which appeared in 1914 and 1915, and he describes his many battles in his autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). His first novel, Tarr, appeared in 1918. The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927), Time and Western Man (1927), and Men without Art (1934) fling out ideas in all directions to more use than some of his other critical works. In 1928 he published the first volume, The Childermass, of a proposed sequence, The Human Age, and this was continued with Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta in 1955. A fourth section of this apocalyptic fantasy was never written. His other novels include The Apes of God (1930), The Revenge for Love (1937), and Self Condemned (1954), which deals in part autobiographically with his time as a lecturer in Canada during the Second World War.

MANSFIELD, Katherine (pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp: 1888–1923), was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and educated there and in London. She settled in London in 1908. She married George Bowden in 1909 but separated from him the same year and lived with John Middleton Murry from 1912 and married him on her divorce in 1918. Her early stories were published in The New Age and collected in In a German Pension (1911). She began writing stories of New Zealand and this movement was confirmed when her younger brother came to England to enlist in the Army and was killed in an accident in 1915. Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) contain the best of her work. She developed tuberculosis and spent her winters in the South of France and Switzerland. After her death Murry collected two volumes of stories, some unfinished: The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories (1923) and Something Childish and Other Stories (1924).

MAUGHAM, William Somerset (1874–1965), born in France, educated King’s School, Canterbury, Heidelberg University, and St Thomas’s Hospital, London, where he qualified in medicine, though he never practised. Of Human Bondage (1915) draws on his early experiences. Liza of Lambeth (1897) was his first novel; he gained success as a comic dramatist before the war. He married Syrie Wellcome in 1915 (divorced 1927); during the war he was in Intelligence, which gave him material for the short stories in Ashenden (1928). He travelled widely and settled in the South of France. Among his novels are: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale(1930), The Narrow Corner (1932), and The Razor’s Edge (1944).

ORWELL, George (pseudonym of Eric Blair, 1903–50), was born in India, the son of an Indian Civil Servant. After school at Eton he joined the Indian Imperial Police in 1922 and served in Burma. He grew to hate imperialism and resigned in 1927. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) is based on his experiences (undertaken to see how the poor live) as a tramp in England and a period of poverty in France. Burmese Days (1934), a didactic novel, was followed by The Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) which deals with physically and emotionally impoverished lives. In 1936 he went to the depressed areas of the North of England on behalf of the Left Book Club and recorded his experiences in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), married Eileen O’Shaughnessy on his return to London, and, at the very end of the year, went to Spain and joined the POUM (basically Trotskyist) militia. He was wounded in the throat and was invalided home in 1937 but not before being involved in the struggle between the POUM and the Stalinist Communist forces. Homage to Catalonia (1938) deals with his time in Spain and caused great dissension in left-wing circles. He joined the Independent Labour Party in 1938. Coming Up for Air (1939) was his last novel before the outbreak of war, in which he worked for the BBC and wrote a great deal of political journalism, notably in Tribune, of which he was for some time the literary editor. His critical and political essays have been gathered together in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (4 vols, ed. by S. Orwell and I. Angus, 1968). Animal Farm (1945) was a great success but by this time the tuberculosis from which he had long suffered made him a very sick man. His wife died in 1945. By the time he finished Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) he was dying. He married Sonia Brownell in hospital three months before his death.

POWELL, Anthony (b. 1905), of a military family, was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford and before the Second World War worked for a publisher and as a film scriptwriter. In 1934 he married Lady Violet Pakenham, by whom he had two sons. He published five novels before the war, in which he served first in his father’s regiment and then in the Intelligence Corps: Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932), From a View to a Death (1933), Agents and Patients (1936), and What’s Become of Waring (1939). After the war he edited Aubrey’s Brief Lives (1949) and published John Aubrey and His Friends (1948) and then began a sequence of twelve novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, of which the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, appeared in 1951 and the last, Hearing Secret Harmonies, in 1975. He has also produced a series of four memoirs and further novels.

POWYS, John Cowper (1872–1963), son of a clergyman and brother of the writers Llewelyn and T. F. Powys, was educated at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He taught in girls’ schools and became a free-lance lecturer, having great success in the USA, where he lived for part of each year from 1910 to 1928 and for the whole of the period 1928–1934. He married Margaret Lyon in 1896 and had one son. He first published poetry: Odes and Other Poems (1896), Poems (1899), and followed these with novels, including Wood and Stone: A Romance (1915) and Ducdame (1925). He produced numerous volumes of poems, the last being Lucifer (1956), many critical and polemical works, including In Defence of Sensuality (1930), an Autobiography (1934) and some fifteen novels. His reputation rests on three of these: Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), and Weymouth Sands (New York, 1934; published as Jobber Skald in London in 1934).

RICHARDSON, Henry Handel (pseudonym of Ethel Florence Richardson 1870–1946) was born, the daughter of a doctor, in Melbourne, Australia. She was educated at the Melbourne Presbyterian Ladies’ College, which is the setting of the largely autobiographical The Getting of Wisdom (1910). In 1889 she went to Leipzig to study the piano but decided against attempting a career as a concert pianist. She married J. G. Robertson, then a free-lance teacher, in 1895. They lived in Strasbourg, until Robertson’s appointment in 1903 to the Professorship of German at London University. Thereafter she lived in England. Maurice Guest (1908) is set among music students in Leipzig and her major work, the trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (Australia Felix, 1917; The Way Home, 1925; Ultima Thule 1929) is the tragic story of a doctor and his family in Australia. The Young Cosima appeared in 1939 and the autobiographical Myself When Young posthumously in 1948.

RICHARDSON, Dorothy (1873–1957), born at Abingdon, Oxforshire, she became a teacher first in Hanover, an experience on which she drew for her first novel, Pointed Roofs (1915), and then in London; she later became secretary to a dentist. She moved in feminist and socialist circles in London, undertook a number of translations and had a love affair with H. G. Wells which is reflected in one of her novels. She married Alan Odle in 1917. Her life’s work was a series of thirteen linked novels centred on a character who has many resemblances to the author, in which she makes use of a form of internal monologue. The first twelve novels were collected in 1938 as Pilgrimage and the last was added for an edition in 1967. Interest in her work has always centred on the technical method which she developed in isolation from other practitioners of the ‘stream of consciousness’.

SAKI (pseudonym of H. H. Munro, 1870–1916), born in Burma, the son of an officer in the military police; his mother died when he was aged two and he was brought up by maiden aunts in Devonshire and took his revenge on them in many of his witty and cruel stories. After a short period in the Burma Police he became a journalist, acting as foreign correspondent in the Balkans and St Petersburg, and began writing short stories. These were collected in a number of volumes, including Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1912), and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914). The Unbearable Bassington (1912) is a novel of the same feline type and When William Came (1913) is a story of Britain under German occupation intended as a warning. He joined up in 1914, refused a commission and was killed on the Western Front.

WAUGH, Evelyn Arthur St John (1903–66), son of a publisher, was educated at Lancing College and Hertford College, Oxford, and thereafter briefly at Heatherley’s Art School. He taught for a short time at two private schools, and in 1928 published Rossetti: His Life and Works and his first novel, Decline and Fall, and married the Hon. Evelyn Gardner (from whom he was divorced in 1929). A series of novels established his reputation as a comic writer: Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938), Put Out More Flags (1942). He became a Roman Catholic in 1930 and in 1936 his first marriage was annulled and in 1937 he married Laura Herbert, by whom he had three sons and three daughters. At this period he also produced a biography, Edmund Campion (1935), and a number of travel books from which selections were included in When the Going Was Good (1946). He served in the Royal Marines during the Second World War and on a military mission to Yugoslavia. Brideshead Revisited (1945) was very successful and was followed by Scott King’s Modern Europe (1947). The Loved One (1948) a satire on American funeral practices, a historical novel about St Helena, the Mother of Constantine the Great, Helena (1950), and a remarkably frank fictional account of delusions from which he suffered as a consequence of mixing too much drink and drugs, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). The most substantial works of the latter part of his life are three novels concerned with the war: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961), which were revised as a trilogy, Sword of Honour (1965).

WELLS, Herbert George (1866–1946), was the son of a shopkeeper who had previously been a gardener and professional cricketer, and a former lady’s maid. When his father was injured in 1877 his mother went to work as a housekeeper and young Wells was apprenticed first to a draper, then to a chemist, and then to another draper in Southsea - an experience on which he drew for Kipps (1905). He then went to Midhurst Grammar School (whose headmaster had met him earlier and been impressed) from which he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (now Imperial College). After a spell of teaching in North Wales he returned to London and took a first-class London external degree in biology. He supported himself by teaching but began scientific journalism. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel Wells but was soon attracted by one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (always known as Jane), and left his wife for her in 1894. He was divorced in 1895, married Jane and started his serious career as a writer (a textbook of biology in 1893 may be passed by) with the publication of The Time Machine (1895). This was followed by a succession of works of science fiction, including The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men on the Moon (1901) as well as many short stories. He became friendly with many other writers, Conrad, James, Stephen Crane, and especially Bennett; he began writing novels (as distinct from science fiction)—Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), and also political pamphlets and tracts provoked by the arguments within the Fabian Society, of which he was a member from 1903 to 1908 and where he and Bernard Shaw were frequently opponents. With some exceptions (such as The History of Mr Polly (1910)) his novels tendito become increasingly concerned, frequently didactically, with social problems: Tono Bungay (1909), Ann Veronica (1909) - the product of one of his frequent love-affairs of which the most significant was with Rebecca West by whom he had a son - The New Machiavelli (1911). A lengthy dispute with Henry James about how far fiction can be a pure art and how far it should include ‘journalistic’ elements culminated in his parody of James in Boon (1915) which led to a breach between them. Wells’s desire to teach became stronger and stronger and found expression not only in novels—Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), The World of William Clissold (1926), The Bulpington of Blup (1932) - and the science fiction The Shape of Things to Come (1933), but also in The Outline of History (1920), The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931), and The Open Conspiracy (1928) in which he puts forward the idea of a declared conspiracy of superior men and women who alone can put the world right. His productivity remained extraordinary (altogether he published nearly one hundred books) but most of the later works are pamphlets or didactic novels which corresponded to his mixture of optimism that a reasonable mankind could manage things better and pessimism that observed that mankind was not reasonable. He died in 1946.

WOOLF, Virginia (1882–1941), daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, critic, mountaineer, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and his second wife, Julia. She was educated at home. Her mother’s death in 1895 was followed by the first of the periods of mental disorder which recurred throughout her life. After her father’s death in 1904 she moved with her two brothers and her sister Vanessa to a house in Bloomsbury; here, and in another house nearby to which she moved after the death of her brother Toby and the marriage of Vanessa, she was a member of a group of friends, commonly known as the Bloomsbury Group, who met to talk and argue about politics, the arts, philosophy, and morals. The group included, at different times, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell (her sister’s husband), J. M. Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912. The Voyage Out (1915) was published in the middle of one of her attacks of insanity (which usually followed the effort of working on a novel and did not accompany it). In 1917 she and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, which published, besides other work of distinction, almost all her subsequent books. Her second novel, Night and Day (1919), was followed by Jacob’s Room (1922) in which she first developed her individual narrative technique. She reviewed regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals and collected her essays in two volumes of The Common Reader (1925 and 1932); other essays, including the well-known Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924), appeared as Hogarth Press pamphlets. Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) develop with great success the method first used in Jacob’s Room, and The Waves (1931) takes the dematerialization of plot and character to its furthest development. Her last two novels are The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941, posth.). She also wrote a number of short stories, collected in Monday or Tuesday (1921) and (with some omissions and additions) in A Haunted House (1943). Orlando (1928), a historical fantasy about androgyny, sprang from her love-affair with Vita Sackville-West, Flush (1933) is the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, Roger Fry (1940) is a biography of an old friend. A Room of One’s Own (1929) reprints two lectures about the position of women in a masculine literary world and Three Guineas (1938) deals with women and war. In 1941, having just completed Between the Acts and depressed by bombing and fears for her own sanity, she drowned herself.