The impact of World War I upon the Anglo-American
Modernists has been noted. In addition the war brought a
variety of responses from the more-traditionalist
writers, predominantly poets, who saw action. Rupert
Brooke caught the idealism of the opening months of the
war (and died in service); Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor
Gurney caught the mounting anger and sense of waste as
the war continued; and Isaac Rosenberg (perhaps the most
original of the war poets), Wilfred Owen, and
Edmund
Blunden not only caught the comradely compassion of the
trenches but also addressed themselves to the larger
moral perplexities raised by the war (Rosenberg and Owen
were killed in action).
It was not until the 1930s, however, that much of
this poetry became widely known. In the wake of the war
the dominant tone, at once cynical and bewildered, was
set by Aldous Huxley’s satirical novel Crome Yellow
(1921). Drawing upon
Lawrence and
Eliot, he concerned
himself in his novels of ideas—Antic Hay (1923), Those
Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point
(1928)—with the fate of the individual in rootless
modernity. His pessimistic vision found its most
complete expression in the 1930s, however, in his most
famous and inventive novel, the anti-utopian fantasy
Brave New World (1932), and his account of the anxieties
of middle-class intellectuals of the period, Eyeless in
Gaza (1936).
Rupert
Brooke
born Aug. 3, 1887, Rugby, Warwickshire,
Eng.
died April 23, 1915, Skyros, Greece
English poet, a wellborn, gifted, handsome
youth whose early death in World War I
contributed to his idealized image in the
interwar period. His best-known work is the
sonnet sequence 1914.
At school at Rugby, where his father was
a master, Brooke distinguished himself as a
cricket and football (soccer) player as well
as a scholar. At King’s College, Cambridge,
where he matriculated in 1906, he was
prominent in the Fabian (Socialist) Society
and attracted innumerable friends. He
studied in Germany and traveled in Italy,
but his favourite pastime was rambling in
the countryside around the village of
Grantchester, which he celebrated in a
charming and wildly irrational panegyric,
“The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (1912). In
1911 his Poems were published. He spent a
year (1913–14) wandering in the United
States, Canada, and the South Seas. With the
outbreak of World War I, he received a
commission in the Royal Navy. After taking
part in a disastrous expedition to Antwerp
that ended in a harrowing retreat, he sailed
for the Dardanelles, which he never reached.
He died of septicemia on a hospital ship off
Skyros and was buried in an olive grove on
that island.
Brooke’s wartime sonnets, 1914 (1915),
brought him immediate fame. They express an
idealism in the face of death that is in
strong contrast to the later poetry of
trench warfare. One of his most popular
sonnets, “The Soldier,” begins with the
familiar lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign
field
That is for ever England.
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Siegfried Sassoon
born Sept. 8, 1886, Brenchley, Kent, Eng.
died Sept. 1, 1967, Heytesbury, Wiltshire
English poet and novelist, known for his
antiwar poetry and for his fictionalized
autobiographies, praised for their evocation
of English country life.
Sassoon enlisted in World War I and was
twice wounded seriously while serving as an
officer in France. It was his antiwar
poetry, such as The Old Huntsman (1917) and
Counterattack (1918), and his public
affirmation of pacifism, after he had won
the Military Cross and was still in the
army, that made him widely known. His
antiwar protests were at first attributed to
shell shock, and he was confined for a time
in a sanatorium, where he met and influenced
another pacifist soldier-poet, Wilfred Owen,
whose works he published after Owen was
killed at the front. His autobiographical
works include The Memoirs of George Sherston,
3 vol. (1928–36), and Siegfried’s Journey, 3
vol. (1945), and more of his poems were
published as Collected Poems (1947) and The
Path to Peace (1960). His later poetry was
increasingly devotional.
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Isaac Rosenberg
Isaac Rosenberg (25 November 1890 – 1
April 1918) was an English poet of the First
World War who was considered to be one of
the greatest of all English war poets. His
"Poems from the Trenches" are recognised as
some of the most outstanding written during
the First World War.
Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in
1890 to Barnet and Annie Rosenberg, who had
fled Devinsk in Lithuania to escape
anti-Jewish pogroms. In 1897 the family
moved to 47 Cable Street in a poor district
of the East End of London, and one with a
strong Jewish community. He attended St.
Paul's School around the corner in Wellclose
Square, until his family (of Russian
descent) moved to Stepney in 1900, so he
could experience Jewish schooling. He left
school at the age of fourteen and became an
apprentice engraver.
He was interested in both poetry and
visual art, and managed to find the finances
to attend the Slade School. During his time
at Slade School, Rosenberg notably studied
alongside David Bomberg, Mark Gertler,
Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth
and Dora Carrington. He was taken up by
Laurence Binyon and Edward Marsh, and began
to write poetry seriously, but he suffered
from ill-health.
Afraid that his chronic bronchitis would
worsen, Rosenberg hoped to try and cure
himself by emigrating to the warmer climate
of South Africa, where his sister Mina
lived.
He wrote the poem On Receiving News of
the War in Cape Town, South Africa. While
others wrote about war as patriotic
sacrifice, Rosenberg was critical of the war
from its onset. However, in order to find a
"job" and be able to help support his
mother, Rosenberg returned to England in
October 1915 and enlisted in the army. He
was assigned to the 12th Suffolk Folk
Regiment, a 'bantam' battalion (men under
5'3"). After turning down an offer to become
a lance corporal, Private Rosenberg was
later transferred to the 11th Battalion, The
King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment (KORL).
He was sent to the Somme on the Western
Front in France where, having just finished
night patrol, he was killed at dawn on April
1, 1918; there is a dispute as to whether
his death occurred at the hands of a sniper
or in close combat. In either case, Fampoux
is the name of the town where he died. He
was first buried in a mass grave, but in
1926, his remains were identified and
reinterred, not in England, but at Bailleul
Road East Cemetery, Plot V, St. Laurent-Blangy,
Pas de Calais, France.
In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul
Fussell's landmark study of the literature
of the First World War, Fussell identifies
Rosenberg's Break of Day in the Trenches as
"the greatest poem of the war."
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Wilfred Owen
born March 18, 1893, Oswestry,
Shropshire, Eng.
killed in action Nov. 4, 1918, France
English poet noted for his anger at the
cruelty and waste of war and his pity for
its victims. He also is significant for his
technical experiments in assonance, which
were particularly influential in the 1930s.
Owen was educated at the Birkenhead
Institute and matriculated at the University
of London; after an illness in 1913 he lived
in France. He had already begun to write
and, while working as a tutor near Bordeaux,
was preparing a book of “Minor Poems—in
Minor Keys—by a Minor,” which was never
published. These early poems are consciously
modeled on those of John Keats; often
ambitious, they show enjoyment of poetry as
a craft.
In 1915 Owen enlisted in the British
army. The experience of trench warfare
brought him to rapid maturity; the poems
written after January 1917 are full of anger
at war’s brutality, an elegiac pity for
“those who die as cattle,” and a rare
descriptive power. In June 1917 he was
wounded and sent home. While in a hospital
near Edinburgh he met the poet Siegfried
Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the
war and who became interested in his work.
Reading Sassoon’s poems and discussing his
work with Sassoon revolutionized Owen’s
style and his conception of poetry. Despite
the plans of well-wishers to find him a
staff job, he returned to France in August
1918 as a company commander. He was awarded
the Military Cross in October and was killed
a week before Armistice Day.
Published posthumously by Sassoon, Owen’s
single volume of poems contains the most
poignant English poetry of the war. His
collected poems, edited by C. Day-Lewis,
were published in 1964; his collected
letters, edited by his younger brother
Harold Owen and John Bell, were published in
1967.
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Aldous Huxley
born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey,
Eng.
died Nov. 22, 1963, Los Angeles
English novelist and critic gifted with an
acute and far-ranging intelligence. His
works were notable for their elegance, wit,
and pessimistic satire.
Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the
prominent biologist T.H. Huxley and was the
third child of the biographer and man of
letters Leonard Huxley. He was educated at
Eton, during which time he became partially
blind owing to keratitis. He retained enough
eyesight to read with difficulty, and he
graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in
1916. He published his first book in 1916
and worked on the periodical Athenaeum from
1919 to 1921. Thereafter he devoted himself
largely to his own writing and spent much of
his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when
he settled in California.
Huxley established himself as a major
author in his first two published novels,
Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923);
these are witty and malicious satires on the
pretensions of the English literary and
intellectual coteries of his day. Those
Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point
(1928) are works in a similar vein. Huxley’s
deep distrust of 20th-century trends in both
politics and technology found expression in
Brave New World (1932), a nightmarish vision
of a future society in which psychological
conditioning forms the basis for a
scientifically determined and immutable
caste system. The novel Eyeless in Gaza
(1936) continues to shoot barbs at the
emptiness and aimlessness experienced in
contemporary society, but it also shows
Huxley’s growing interest in Hindu
philosophy and mysticism as a viable
alternative. Many of his subsequent works
reflect this preoccupation, notably The
Perennial Philosophy (1946).
Huxley’s most important later works are
The Devils of Loudun (1952), a brilliantly
detailed psychological study of a historical
incident in which a group of 17th-century
French nuns were allegedly the victims of
demonic possession; and The Doors of
Perception (1954), a book about Huxley’s
experiences with the hallucinogenic drug
mescaline. The author’s lifelong
preoccupation with the negative and positive
impacts of science and technology on
20th-century life make him one of the
representative writers and intellectuals of
that century.
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Huxley’s frank and disillusioned manner was echoed by
the dramatist Noël Coward in The Vortex (1924), which
established his reputation; by the poet
Robert Graves in
his autobiography, Good-Bye to All That (1929); and by
the poet Richard Aldington in his
Death of a Hero
(1929), a semiautobiographical novel of prewar bohemian
London and the trenches. Exceptions to this dominant
mood were found among writers too old to consider
themselves, as did Graves and Aldington, members of a
betrayed generation. In A Passage to India (1924),
E.M.
Forster examined the quest for and failure of human
understanding among various ethnic and social groups in
India under British rule. In Parade’s End (1950;
comprising Some Do Not, 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A
Man Could Stand Up, 1926; and Last Post, 1928) Ford
Madox Ford, with an obvious debt to James and Conrad,
examined the demise of aristocratic England in the
course of the war, exploring on a larger scale the
themes he had treated with brilliant economy in his
short novel The Good Soldier (1915). And in Wolf Solent
(1929) and A Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper
Powys developed an eccentric and highly erotic
mysticism.
These were, however, writers of an earlier, more
confident era. A younger and more contemporary voice
belonged to members of the Bloomsbury group. Setting
themselves against the humbug and hypocrisy that, they
believed, had marked their parents’ generation in
upper-class England, they aimed to be uncompromisingly
honest in personal and artistic life. In Lytton
Strachey’s iconoclastic biographical study Eminent
Victorians (1918), this amounted to little more than
amusing irreverence, even though Strachey had a profound
effect upon the writing of biography; but in the fiction
of
Virginia Woolf the rewards of this outlook were both
profound and moving. In short stories and novels of
great delicacy and lyrical power, she set out to portray
the limitations of the self, caught as it is in time,
and suggested that these could be transcended, if only
momentarily, by engagement with another self, a place,
or a work of art. This preoccupation not only charged
the act of reading and writing with unusual significance
but also produced, in To the Lighthouse (1927), The
Waves (1931)—perhaps her most inventive and complex
novel—and Between the Acts (1941), her most sombre and
moving work, some of the most daring fiction produced in
the 20th century.
Woolf believed that her viewpoint offered an
alternative to the destructive egotism of the masculine
mind, an egotism that had found its outlet in World War
I, but, as she made clear in her long essay A Room of
One’s Own (1929), she did not consider this viewpoint to
be the unique possession of women. In her fiction she
presented men who possessed what she held to be feminine
characteristics, a regard for others and an awareness of
the multiplicity of experience; but she remained
pessimistic about women gaining positions of influence,
even though she set out the desirability of this in her
feminist study Three Guineas (1938). Together with
Joyce, who greatly influenced her Mrs. Dalloway (1925),
Woolf transformed the treatment of subjectivity, time,
and history in fiction and helped create a feeling among
her contemporaries that traditional forms of
fiction—with their frequent indifference to the
mysterious and inchoate inner life of characters—were no
longer adequate. Her eminence as a literary critic and
essayist did much to foster an interest in the work of
other female Modernist writers of the period, such as
Katherine Mansfield (born in New Zealand) and Dorothy
Richardson.
Noël Coward
born December 16, 1899, Teddington, near
London, England
died March 26, 1973, St. Mary, Jamaica
English playwright, actor, and composer best
known for highly polished comedies of
manners.
Coward appeared professionally as an
actor from the age of 12. Between acting
engagements he wrote such light comedies as
I’ll Leave It to You (1920) and The Young
Idea (1923), but his reputation as a
playwright was not established until the
serious play The Vortex (1924), which was
highly successful in London. In 1925 the
first of his durable comedies, Hay Fever,
opened in London. Coward ended the decade
with his most popular musical play, Bitter
Sweet (1929).
Another of his classic comedies, Private
Lives (1930), is often revived. It shares
with Design for Living (1933) a worldly
milieu and characters unable to live with or
without one another. His patriotic pageant
of British history, Cavalcade (1931), traced
an English family from the time of the South
African (Boer) War through the end of World
War I. Other successes included Tonight at
Eight-Thirty (1936), a group of one-act
plays performed by Coward and Gertrude
Lawrence, with whom he often played. He
rewrote one of the short plays, Still Life,
as the film Brief Encounter (1946). Present
Laughter (1939) and Blithe Spirit (1941;
filmed 1945; musical version, High Spirits,
1964) are usually listed among his better
comedies.
In his plays Coward caught the clipped
speech and brittle disillusion of the
generation that emerged from World War I.
His songs and revue sketches also struck the
world-weary note of his times. Coward had
another style, sentimental but theatrically
effective, that he used for romantic,
backward-glancing musicals and for plays
constructed around patriotism or some other
presumably serious theme. He performed
almost every function in the
theatre—including producing, directing,
dancing, and singing in a quavering but
superbly timed and articulate baritone—and
acted in, wrote, and directed motion
pictures as well.
Coward’s Collected Short Stories appeared
in 1962, followed by a further selection,
Bon Voyage, in 1967. Pomp and Circumstance
(1960) is a light novel, and Not Yet the
Dodo (1967) is a collection of verse. His
autobiography through 1931 appeared as
Present Indicative (1937) and was extended
through his wartime years in Future
Indefinite (1954); a third volume, Past
Conditional, was incomplete at his death.
Among his more notable songs are “Mad Dogs
and Englishmen,” “I’ll See You Again,” “Some
Day I’ll Find You,” “Poor Little Rich Girl,”
“Mad About the Boy,” and “Marvellous Party.”
Coward was knighted in 1970. He spent his
last years chiefly in the Caribbean and
Switzerland. One of his previously
unpublished plays, The Better Half, last
performed in 1922 and thought to have been
lost, was rediscovered in 2007. That same
year a collection of his letters was
published as The Letters of Noël Coward.
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Ford
Madox Ford
born Dec. 17, 1873, Merton,
Surrey, Eng.
died June 26, 1939, Deauville, Fr.
English novelist, editor, and critic, an
international influence in early
20th-century literature.
The son of a German music critic, Francis
Hueffer, and a grandson of Ford Madox Brown,
one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Ford
grew up in a cultured, artistic environment.
At 18 he wrote his first novel, The Shifting
of Fire (1892). His acquaintance with Joseph
Conrad in 1897 led to their collaboration in
The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). In
1908 he founded the English Review,
publishing pieces by the foremost
contemporary British authors and also by the
then-unknown D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis,
Ezra Pound, and H.M. Tomlinson. At the same
time, Ford produced works of his own: a
trilogy of historical novels about the
ill-fated Catherine Howard and novels of
contemporary life in which he experimented
with technique and style. It was not until
The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many
to be his best work, that he matched an
assured, controlled technique with powerful
content. This work skillfully reveals the
destructive effects of contradictory sexual
and religious impulses upon a quartet of
upper-middle-class characters.
Ford took part in World War I, in which
he was gassed and shell-shocked. Afterward
he changed his name from Hueffer to Ford and
tried farming in Sussex and Left Bank life
in Paris. While in Paris he edited the
Transatlantic Review (January 1924–January
1925), which published works by James Joyce
and Ernest Hemingway.
In his long literary career Ford had
fruitful contacts with most of the important
writers of the day and is remembered for his
generous encouragement of younger writers.
Of more than 70 published works, those on
which his reputation rests are The Good
Soldier and the tetralogy Parade’s End
(1950; comprising Some Do Not [1924], No
More Parades [1925], A Man Could Stand Up
[1926], and Last Post [1928]). During his
last years, which he spent in France and the
United States, Ford produced important works
of criticism, reminiscences, and a major
novel, The Rash Act (1933), in which he
continued his lifelong exploration of
questions of identity and inheritance.
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John Cowper
Powys
born October 8, 1872, Shirley,
Derbyshire, England
died June 17, 1963, Blaenau Ffestiniog,
Merioneth, Wales
Welsh novelist, essayist, and poet, known
chiefly for his long panoramic novels,
including Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury
Romance (1932), and Owen Glendower (1940).
He was the brother of the authors T.F. Powys
and Llewelyn Powys.
Educated at Sherborne School and the
University of Cambridge, Powys was a
university extension lecturer for about 40
years, 30 of them in the United States. His
works include a striking Autobiography
(1934) and books of essays, among them The
Meaning of Culture (1930), The Pleasures of
Literature (1938), and The Art of Growing
Old (1943).
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Lytton
Strachey
born March 1, 1880, London
died Jan. 21, 1932, Ham Spray House, near
Hungerford, Berkshire, Eng.
English biographer and critic who opened
a new era of biographical writing at the
close of World War I. Adopting an irreverent
attitude to the past and especially to the
monumental life-and-letters volumes of
Victorian biography, Strachey proposed to
write lives with “a brevity which excludes
everything that is redundant and nothing
that is significant.” He is best known for
Eminent Victorians—short sketches of the
Victorian idols Cardinal Manning, Florence
Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and Gen. Charles
“Chinese” Gordon.
After studying at Cambridge (1899–1903),
Strachey lived in London, where he became a
leader in the artistic, intellectual, and
literary Bloomsbury group. He published
critical writings, especially on French
literature, but his greatest achievement was
in biography. After Eminent Victorians
(1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), he wrote
Elizabeth and Essex (1928) and Portraits in
Miniature (1931). Treating his subjects from
a highly idiosyncratic point of view, he was
fascinated by personality and motive and
delighted in pricking the pretensions of the
great and reducing them to somewhat less
than life-size. His aim was to paint a
portrait; and though this led to caricature
and sometimes, through tendentious selection
of material, to inaccuracy, he taught
biographers a sense of form and of
background, and he sharpened their critical
acumen.
His defects as a biographer arose mainly
from his limited vision of life. He saw
politics largely as intrigue, religion as a
ludicrous anachronism, and personal
relations as life’s supremely important
facet. Though bitterly attacked during his
lifetime and after, Strachey remains a
phenomenon in English letters and a
preeminent humorist and wit.
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Virginia Woolf
"Jacob's Room"
original name in full Adeline Virginia
Stephen
born Jan. 25, 1882, London, Eng.
died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex
English writer whose novels, through their
nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a
major influence on the genre.
While she is best known for her novels,
especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the
Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote
pioneering essays on artistic theory,
literary history, women’s writing, and the
politics of power. A fine stylist, she
experimented with several forms of
biographical writing, composed painterly
short fictions, and sent to her friends and
family a lifetime of brilliant letters.
Early life and influences
Born Virginia Stephen, she was the child
of ideal Victorian parents. Her father,
Leslie Stephen, was an eminent literary
figure and the first editor (1882–91) of the
Dictionary of National Biography. Her
mother, Julia Jackson, possessed great
beauty and a reputation for saintly
self-sacrifice; she also had prominent
social and artistic connections, which
included Julia Margaret Cameron, her aunt
and one of the greatest portrait
photographers of the 19th century. Both
Julia Jackson’s first husband, Herbert
Duckworth, and Leslie’s first wife, a
daughter of the novelist William Makepeace
Thackeray, had died unexpectedly, leaving
her three children and him one. Julia
Jackson Duckworth and Leslie Stephen married
in 1878, and four children followed: Vanessa
(born 1879), Thoby (born 1880), Virginia
(born 1882), and Adrian (born 1883). While
these four children banded together against
their older half siblings, loyalties shifted
among them. Virginia was jealous of Adrian
for being their mother’s favourite. At age
nine, she was the genius behind a family
newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, that
often teased Vanessa and Adrian. Vanessa
mothered the others, especially Virginia,
but the dynamic between need (Virginia’s)
and aloofness (Vanessa’s) sometimes
expressed itself as rivalry between
Virginia’s art of writing and Vanessa’s of
painting.
The Stephen family made summer migrations
from their London town house near Kensington
Gardens to the rather disheveled Talland
House on the rugged Cornwall coast. That
annual relocation structured Virginia’s
childhood world in terms of opposites: city
and country, winter and summer, repression
and freedom, fragmentation and wholeness.
Her neatly divided, predictable world ended,
however, when her mother died in 1895 at age
49. Virginia, at 13, ceased writing amusing
accounts of family news. Almost a year
passed before she wrote a cheerful letter to
her brother Thoby. She was just emerging
from depression when, in 1897, her half
sister Stella Duckworth died at age 28, an
event Virginia noted in her diary as
“impossible to write of.” Then in 1904,
after her father died, Virginia had a
nervous breakdown.
While Virginia was recovering, Vanessa
supervised the Stephen children’s move to
the bohemian Bloomsbury section of London.
There the siblings lived independent of
their Duckworth half brothers, free to
pursue studies, to paint or write, and to
entertain. Leonard Woolf dined with them in
November 1904, just before sailing to Ceylon
(now Sri Lanka) to become a colonial
administrator. Soon the Stephens hosted
weekly gatherings of radical young people,
including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and
John Maynard Keynes, all later to achieve
fame as, respectively, an art critic, a
biographer, and an economist. Then, after a
family excursion to Greece in 1906, Thoby
died of typhoid fever. He was 26. Virginia
grieved but did not slip into depression.
She overcame the loss of Thoby and the
“loss” of Vanessa, who became engaged to
Bell just after Thoby’s death, through
writing. Vanessa’s marriage (and perhaps
Thoby’s absence) helped transform
conversation at the avant-garde gatherings
of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury
group into irreverent, sometimes bawdy
repartee that inspired Virginia to exercise
her wit publicly, even while privately she
was writing her poignant Reminiscences—about
her childhood and her lost mother—which was
published in 1908. Viewing Italian art that
summer, she committed herself to creating in
language “some kind of whole made of
shivering fragments,” to capturing “the
flight of the mind.”
Early fiction
Virginia Stephen determined in 1908 to
“re-form” the novel by creating a holistic
form embracing aspects of life that were
“fugitive” from the Victorian novel. While
writing anonymous reviews for the Times
Literary Supplement and other journals, she
experimented with such a novel, which she
called Melymbrosia. In November 1910, Roger
Fry, a new friend of the Bells, launched the
exhibit “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,”
which introduced radical European art to the
London bourgeoisie. Virginia was at once
outraged over the attention that painting
garnered and intrigued by the possibility of
borrowing from the likes of artists Paul
Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. As Clive Bell was
unfaithful, Vanessa began an affair with
Fry, and Fry began a lifelong debate with
Virginia about the visual and verbal arts.
In the summer of 1911, Leonard Woolf
returned from the East. After he resigned
from the colonial service, Leonard and
Virginia married in August 1912. She
continued to work on her first novel; he
wrote the anticolonialist novel The Village
in the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins
(1914), a Bloomsbury exposé. Then he became
a political writer and an advocate for peace
and justice.
Between 1910 and 1915, Virginia’s mental
health was precarious. Nevertheless, she
completely recast Melymbrosia as The Voyage
Out in 1913. She based many of her novel’s
characters on real-life prototypes: Lytton
Strachey, Leslie Stephen, her half brother
George Duckworth, Clive and Vanessa Bell,
and herself. Rachel Vinrace, the novel’s
central character, is a sheltered young
woman who, on an excursion to South America,
is introduced to freedom and sexuality
(though from the novel’s inception she was
to die before marrying). Woolf first made
Terence, Rachel’s suitor, rather Clive-like;
as she revised, Terence became a more
sensitive, Leonard-like character. After an
excursion up the Amazon, Rachel contracts a
terrible illness that plunges her into
delirium and then death. As possible causes
for this disaster, Woolf’s characters
suggest everything from poorly washed
vegetables to jungle disease to a malevolent
universe, but the book endorses no
explanation. That indeterminacy, at odds
with the certainties of the Victorian era,
is echoed in descriptions that distort
perception: while the narrative often
describes people, buildings, and natural
objects as featureless forms, Rachel, in
dreams and then delirium, journeys into
surrealistic worlds. Rachel’s voyage into
the unknown began Woolf’s voyage beyond the
conventions of realism.
Woolf’s manic-depressive worries (that
she was a failure as a writer and a woman,
that she was despised by Vanessa and unloved
by Leonard) provoked a suicide attempt in
September 1913. Publication of The Voyage
Out was delayed until early 1915; then, that
April, she sank into a distressed state in
which she was often delirious. Later that
year she overcame the “vile imaginations”
that had threatened her sanity. She kept the
demons of mania and depression mostly at bay
for the rest of her life.
In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing
press and founded the Hogarth Press, named
for Hogarth House, their home in the London
suburbs. The Woolfs themselves (she was the
compositor while he worked the press)
published their own Two Stories in the
summer of 1917. It consisted of Leonard’s
Three Jews and Virginia’s The Mark on the
Wall, the latter about contemplation itself.
Since 1910, Virginia had kept (sometimes
with Vanessa) a country house in Sussex, and
in 1916 Vanessa settled into a Sussex
farmhouse called Charleston. She had ended
her affair with Fry to take up with the
painter Duncan Grant, who moved to
Charleston with Vanessa and her children,
Julian and Quentin Bell; a daughter,
Angelica, would be born to Vanessa and Grant
at the end of 1918. Charleston soon became
an extravagantly decorated, unorthodox
retreat for artists and writers, especially
Clive Bell, who continued on friendly terms
with Vanessa, and Fry, Vanessa’s lifelong
devotee.
Virginia had kept a diary, off and on,
since 1897. In 1919 she envisioned “the
shadow of some kind of form which a diary
might attain to,” organized not by a
mechanical recording of events but by the
interplay between the objective and the
subjective. Her diary, as she wrote in 1924,
would reveal people as “splinters & mosaics;
not, as they used to hold, immaculate,
monolithic, consistent wholes.” Such terms
later inspired critical distinctions, based
on anatomy and culture, between the feminine
and the masculine, the feminine being a
varied but all-embracing way of experiencing
the world and the masculine a monolithic or
linear way. Critics using these distinctions
have credited Woolf with evolving a
distinctly feminine diary form, one that
explores, with perception, honesty, and
humour, her own ever-changing, mosaic self.
Proving that she could master the
traditional form of the novel before
breaking it, she plotted her next novel in
two romantic triangles, with its protagonist
Katharine in both. Night and Day (1919)
answers Leonard’s The Wise Virgins, in which
he had his Leonard-like protagonist lose the
Virginia-like beloved and end up in a
conventional marriage. In Night and Day, the
Leonard-like Ralph learns to value Katharine
for herself, not as some superior being. And
Katharine overcomes (as Virginia had) class
and familial prejudices to marry the good
and intelligent Ralph. This novel focuses on
the very sort of details that Woolf had
deleted from The Voyage Out: credible
dialogue, realistic descriptions of early
20th-century settings, and investigations of
issues such as class, politics, and
suffrage.
Woolf was writing nearly a review a week
for the Times Literary Supplement in 1918.
Her essay Modern Novels (1919; revised in
1925 as Modern Fiction) attacked the
“materialists” who wrote about superficial
rather than spiritual or “luminous”
experiences. The Woolfs also printed by
hand, with Vanessa Bell’s illustrations,
Virginia’s Kew Gardens (1919), a story
organized, like a Post-Impressionistic
painting, by pattern. With the Hogarth
Press’s emergence as a major publishing
house, the Woolfs gradually ceased being
their own printers.
In 1919 they bought a cottage in Rodmell
village called Monk’s House, which looked
out over the Sussex Downs and the meadows
where the River Ouse wound down to the
English Channel. Virginia could walk or
bicycle to visit Vanessa, her children, and
a changing cast of guests at the bohemian
Charleston and then retreat to Monk’s House
to write. She envisioned a new book that
would apply the theories of Modern Novels
and the achievements of her short stories to
the novel form. In early 1920 a group of
friends, evolved from the early Bloomsbury
group, began a “Memoir Club,” which met to
read irreverent passages from their
autobiographies. Her second presentation was
an exposé of Victorian hypocrisy, especially
that of George Duckworth, who masked
inappropriate, unwanted caresses as
affection honouring their mother’s memory.
In 1921 Woolf’s minimally plotted short
fictions were gathered in Monday or Tuesday.
Meanwhile, typesetting having heightened her
sense of visual layout, she began a new
novel written in blocks to be surrounded by
white spaces. In On Re-Reading Novels
(1922), Woolf argued that the novel was not
so much a form but an “emotion which you
feel.” In Jacob’s Room (1922) she achieved
such emotion, transforming personal grief
over the death of Thoby Stephen into a
“spiritual shape.” Though she takes Jacob
from childhood to his early death in war,
she leaves out plot, conflict, even
character. The emptiness of Jacob’s room and
the irrelevance of his belongings convey in
their minimalism the profound emptiness of
loss. Though Jacob’s Room is an antiwar
novel, Woolf feared that she had ventured
too far beyond representation. She vowed to
“push on,” as she wrote Clive Bell, to graft
such experimental techniques onto
more-substantial characters.
Major period
At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs
moved their city residence from the suburbs
back to Bloomsbury, where they were less
isolated from London society. Soon the
aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to
court Virginia, a relationship that would
blossom into a lesbian affair. Having
already written a story about a Mrs.
Dalloway, Woolf thought of a foiling device
that would pair that highly sensitive woman
with a shell-shocked war victim, a Mr.
Smith, so that “the sane and the insane”
would exist “side by side.” Her aim was to
“tunnel” into these two characters until
Clarissa Dalloway’s affirmations meet
Septimus Smith’s negations. Also in 1924
Woolf gave a talk at Cambridge called
Character in Fiction, revised later that
year as the Hogarth Press pamphlet Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In it she celebrated
the breakdown in patriarchal values that had
occurred “in or about December, 1910”—during
Fry’s exhibit “Manet and the
Post-Impressionists”—and she attacked
“materialist” novelists for omitting the
essence of character.
In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the boorish
doctors presume to understand personality,
but its essence evades them. This novel is
as patterned as a Post-Impressionist
painting but is also so accurately
representational that the reader can trace
Clarissa’s and Septimus’s movements through
the streets of London on a single day in
June 1923. At the end of the day, Clarissa
gives a grand party and Septimus commits
suicide. Their lives come together when the
doctor who was treating (or, rather,
mistreating) Septimus arrives at Clarissa’s
party with news of the death. The main
characters are connected by motifs and,
finally, by Clarissa’s intuiting why
Septimus threw his life away.
Woolf wished to build on her achievement
in Mrs. Dalloway by merging the novelistic
and elegiac forms. As an elegy, To the
Lighthouse—published on May 5, 1927, the
32nd anniversary of Julia Stephen’s
death—evoked childhood summers at Talland
House. As a novel, it broke narrative
continuity into a tripartite structure. The
first section, “The Window,” begins as Mrs.
Ramsay and James, her youngest son—like
Julia and Adrian Stephen—sit in the French
window of the Ramsays’ summer home while a
houseguest named Lily Briscoe paints them
and James begs to go to a nearby lighthouse.
Mr. Ramsay, like Leslie Stephen, sees poetry
as didacticism, conversation as winning
points, and life as a tally of
accomplishments. He uses logic to deflate
hopes for a trip to the lighthouse, but he
needs sympathy from his wife. She is more
attuned to emotions than reason. In the
climactic dinner-party scene, she inspires
such harmony and composure that the moment
“partook, she felt,…of eternity.” The
novel’s middle “Time Passes” section focuses
on the empty house during a 10-year hiatus
and the last-minute housecleaning for the
returning Ramsays. Woolf describes the
progress of weeds, mold, dust, and gusts of
wind, but she merely announces such major
events as the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and a
son and daughter. In the novel’s third
section, “The Lighthouse,” Woolf brings Mr.
Ramsay, his youngest children (James and
Cam), Lily Briscoe, and others from “The
Window” back to the house. As Mr. Ramsay and
the now-teenage children reach the
lighthouse and achieve a moment of
reconciliation, Lily completes her painting.
To the Lighthouse melds into its structure
questions about creativity and the nature
and function of art. Lily argues effectively
for nonrepresentational but emotive art, and
her painting (in which mother and child are
reduced to two shapes with a line between
them) echoes the abstract structure of
Woolf’s profoundly elegiac novel.
In two 1927 essays, The Art of Fiction
and The New Biography, she wrote that
fiction writers should be less concerned
with naive notions of reality and more with
language and design. However restricted by
fact, she argued, biographers should yoke
truth with imagination, “granite-like
solidity” with “rainbow-like intangibility.”
Their relationship having cooled by 1927,
Woolf sought to reclaim Sackville-West
through a “biography” that would include
Sackville family history. Woolf solved
biographical, historical, and personal
dilemmas with the story of Orlando, who
lives from Elizabethan times through the
entire 18th century; he then becomes female,
experiences debilitating gender constraints,
and lives into the 20th century. Orlando
begins writing poetry during the
Renaissance, using history and mythology as
models, and over the ensuing centuries
returns to the poem The Oak Tree, revising
it according to shifting poetic conventions.
Woolf herself writes in mock-heroic
imitation of biographical styles that change
over the same period of time. Thus, Orlando:
A Biography (1928) exposes the artificiality
of both gender and genre prescriptions.
However fantastic, Orlando also argues for a
novelistic approach to biography.
In 1921 John Maynard Keynes had told
Woolf that her memoir “on George,” presented
to the Memoir Club that year or a year
earlier, represented her best writing.
Afterward she was increasingly angered by
masculine condescension to female talent. In
A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf blamed
women’s absence from history not on their
lack of brains and talent but on their
poverty. For her 1931 talk Professions for
Women, Woolf studied the history of women’s
education and employment and argued that
unequal opportunities for women negatively
affect all of society. She urged women to
destroy the “angel in the house,” a
reference to Coventry Patmore’s poem of that
title, the quintessential Victorian paean to
women who sacrifice themselves to men.
Having praised a 1930 exhibit of Vanessa
Bell’s paintings for their wordlessness,
Woolf planned a mystical novel that would be
similarly impersonal and abstract. In The
Waves (1931), poetic interludes describe the
sea and sky from dawn to dusk. Between the
interludes, the voices of six named
characters appear in sections that move from
their childhood to old age. In the middle
section, when the six friends meet at a
farewell dinner for another friend leaving
for India, the single flower at the centre
of the dinner table becomes a “seven-sided
flower…a whole flower to which every eye
brings its own contribution.” The Waves
offers a six-sided shape that illustrates
how each individual experiences
events—including their friend’s
death—uniquely. Bernard, the writer in the
group, narrates the final section, defying
death and a world “without a self.” Unique
though they are (and their prototypes can be
identified in the Bloomsbury group), the
characters become one, just as the sea and
sky become indistinguishable in the
interludes. This oneness with all creation
was the primal experience Woolf had felt as
a child in Cornwall. In this her most
experimental novel, she achieved its poetic
equivalent. Through To the Lighthouse and
The Waves, Woolf became, with James Joyce
and William Faulkner, one of the three major
English-language Modernist experimenters in
stream-of-consciousness writing.
Late work
From her earliest days, Woolf had framed
experience in terms of oppositions, even
while she longed for a holistic state beyond
binary divisions. The “perpetual marriage of
granite and rainbow” Woolf described in her
essay The New Biography typified her
approach during the 1930s to individual
works and to a balance between writing works
of fact and of imagination. Even before
finishing The Waves, she began compiling a
scrapbook of clippings illustrating the
horrors of war, the threat of fascism, and
the oppression of women. The discrimination
against women that Woolf had discussed in A
Room of One’s Own and Professions for Women
inspired her to plan a book that would trace
the story of a fictional family named
Pargiter and explain the social conditions
affecting family members over a period of
time. In The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay she
would alternate between sections of fiction
and of fact. For the fictional historical
narrative, she relied upon experiences of
friends and family from the Victorian Age to
the 1930s. For the essays, she researched
that 50-year span of history. The task,
however, of moving between fiction and fact
was daunting.
Woolf took a holiday from The Pargiters
to write a mock biography of Flush, the dog
of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lytton
Strachey having recently died, Woolf muted
her spoof of his biographical method;
nevertheless, Flush (1933) remains both a
biographical satire and a lighthearted
exploration of perception, in this case a
dog’s. In 1935 Woolf completed Freshwater,
an absurdist drama based on the life of her
great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. Featuring
such other eminences as the poet Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, and the painter George
Frederick Watts, this riotous play satirizes
high-minded Victorian notions of art.
Meanwhile, Woolf feared she would never
finish The Pargiters. Alternating between
types of prose was proving cumbersome, and
the book was becoming too long. She solved
this dilemma by jettisoning the essay
sections, keeping the family narrative, and
renaming her book The Years. She narrated 50
years of family history through the decline
of class and patriarchal systems, the rise
of feminism, and the threat of another war.
Desperate to finish, Woolf lightened the
book with poetic echoes of gestures,
objects, colours, and sounds and with
wholesale deletions, cutting epiphanies for
Eleanor Pargiter and explicit references to
women’s bodies. The novel illustrates the
damage done to women and society over the
years by sexual repression, ignorance, and
discrimination. Though (or perhaps because)
Woolf’s trimming muted the book’s
radicalism, The Years (1937) became a best
seller.
When Fry died in 1934, Virginia was
distressed; Vanessa was devastated. Then in
July 1937 Vanessa’s elder son, Julian Bell,
was killed in the Spanish Civil War while
driving an ambulance for the Republican
army. Vanessa was so disconsolate that
Virginia put aside her writing for a time to
try to comfort her sister. Privately a
lament over Julian’s death and publicly a
diatribe against war, Three Guineas (1938)
proposes answers to the question of how to
prevent war. Woolf connected masculine
symbols of authority with militarism and
misogyny, an argument buttressed by notes
from her clippings about aggression,
fascism, and war.
Still distressed by the deaths of Roger
Fry and Julian Bell, she determined to test
her theories about experimental, novelistic
biography in a life of Fry. As she
acknowledged in The Art of Biography (1939),
the recalcitrance of evidence brought her
near despair over the possibility of writing
an imaginative biography. Against the
“grind” of finishing the Fry biography,
Woolf wrote a verse play about the history
of English literature. Her next novel,
Pointz Hall (later retitled Between the
Acts), would include the play as a pageant
performed by villagers and would convey the
gentry’s varied reactions to it. As another
holiday from Fry’s biography, Woolf returned
to her own childhood with A Sketch of the
Past, a memoir about her mixed feelings
toward her parents and her past and about
memoir writing itself. (Here surfaced for
the first time in writing a memory of the
teenage Gerald Duckworth, her other half
brother, touching her inappropriately when
she was a girl of perhaps four or five.)
Through last-minute borrowing from the
letters between Fry and Vanessa, Woolf
finished her biography. Though convinced
that Roger Fry (1940) was more granite than
rainbow, Virginia congratulated herself on
at least giving back to Vanessa “her Roger.”
Woolf’s chief anodyne against Adolf
Hitler, World War II, and her own despair
was writing. During the bombing of London in
1940 and 1941, she worked on her memoir and
Between the Acts. In her novel, war
threatens art and humanity itself, and, in
the interplay between the pageant—performed
on a June day in 1939—and the audience,
Woolf raises questions about perception and
response. Despite Between the Acts’s
affirmation of the value of art, Woolf
worried that this novel was “too slight” and
indeed that all writing was irrelevant when
England seemed on the verge of invasion and
civilization about to slide over a
precipice. Facing such horrors, a depressed
Woolf found herself unable to write. The
demons of self-doubt that she had kept at
bay for so long returned to haunt her. On
March 28, 1941, fearing that she now lacked
the resilience to battle them, she walked
behind Monk’s House and down to the River
Ouse, put stones in her pockets, and drowned
herself. Between the Acts was published
posthumously later that year.
Assessment
Woolf’s experiments with point of view
confirm that, as Bernard thinks in The
Waves, “we are not single.” Being neither
single nor fixed, perception in her novels
is fluid, as is the world she presents.
While Joyce and Faulkner separate one
character’s interior monologues from
another’s, Woolf’s narratives move between
inner and outer and between characters
without clear demarcations. Furthermore, she
avoids the self-absorption of many of her
contemporaries and implies a brutal society
without the explicit details some of her
contemporaries felt obligatory. Her
nonlinear forms invite reading not for neat
solutions but for an aesthetic resolution of
“shivering fragments,” as she wrote in 1908.
While Woolf’s fragmented style is distinctly
Modernist, her indeterminacy anticipates a
postmodern awareness of the evanescence of
boundaries and categories.
Woolf’s many essays about the art of
writing and about reading itself today
retain their appeal to a range of, in Samuel
Johnson’s words, “common” (unspecialized)
readers. Woolf’s collection of essays The
Common Reader (1925) was followed by The
Common Reader: Second Series (1932; also
published as The Second Common Reader). She
continued writing essays on reading and
writing, women and history, and class and
politics for the rest of her life. Many were
collected after her death in volumes edited
by Leonard Woolf.
Virginia Woolf wrote far more fiction
than Joyce and far more nonfiction than
either Joyce or Faulkner. Six volumes of
diaries (including her early journals), six
volumes of letters, and numerous volumes of
collected essays show her deep engagement
with major 20th-century issues. Though many
of her essays began as reviews, written
anonymously to deadlines for money, and many
include imaginative settings and whimsical
speculations, they are serious inquiries
into reading and writing, the novel and the
arts, perception and essence, war and peace,
class and politics, privilege and
discrimination, and the need to reform
society.
Woolf’s haunting language, her prescient
insights into wide-ranging historical,
political, feminist, and artistic issues,
and her revisionist experiments with
novelistic form during a remarkably
productive career altered the course of
Modernist and postmodernist letters.
Panthea Reid
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Indeed, as a result of late 20th-century rereadings
of Modernism, scholars now recognize the central
importance of women writers to British Modernism,
particularly as manifested in the works of Mansfield,
Richardson, May Sinclair, Mary Butts, Rebecca
West
(pseudonym of Cicily Isabel Andrews), Jean Rhys (born in
the West Indies), and the American poet Hilda Doolittle
(who spent her adult life mainly in England and
Switzerland). Sinclair, who produced 24 novels in the
course of a prolific literary career, was an active
feminist and an advocate of psychical research,
including psychoanalysis. These concerns were evident in
her most accomplished novels, Mary Olivier: A Life
(1919) and Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922),
which explored the ways in which her female characters
contributed to their own social and psychological
repression. West, whose pen name was based on one of
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s female characters,
was similarly interested in female self-negation. From
her first and greatly underrated novel, The Return of
the Soldier (1918), to later novels such as Harriet Hume
(1929), she explored how and why middle-class women so
tenaciously upheld the division between private and
public spheres and helped to sustain the traditional
values of the masculine world. West became a highly
successful writer on social and political issues—she
wrote memorably on the Balkans and on the Nürnberg
trials at the end of World War II—but her public acclaim
as a journalist obscured during her lifetime her greater
achievements as a novelist.
In her 13-volume Pilgrimage (the first volume,
Pointed Roofs, appeared in 1915; the last, March
Moonlight, in 1967), Richardson was far more positive
about the capacity of women to realize themselves. She
presented events through the mind of her
autobiographical persona, Miriam Henderson, describing
both the social and economic limitations and the
psychological and intellectual possibilities of a young
woman without means coming of age with the new century.
Other women writers of the period also made major
contributions to new kinds of psychological realism. In
Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and
Other Stories (1922), Mansfield (who went to England at
age 19) revolutionized the short story by rejecting the
mechanisms of plot in favour of an impressionistic sense
of the flow of experience, punctuated by an arresting
moment of insight. In Postures (1928, reprinted as
Quartet in 1969), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good
Morning, Midnight (1939), Rhys depicted the lives of
vulnerable women adrift in London and Paris, vulnerable
because they were poor and because the words in which
they innocently believed—honesty in relationships,
fidelity in marriage—proved in practice to be empty.
Creating heavily symbolic novels based on the
quest-romance, such as Ashe of Rings (1925) and Armed
with Madness (1928), Butts explored a more general loss
of value in the contemporary wasteland (T.S. Eliot was
an obvious influence on her work), while Doolittle
(whose reputation rested upon her contribution to the
Imagist movement in poetry) used the quest-romance in a
series of autobiographical novels—including Paint It
Today (written in 1921 but first published in 1992) and
Bid Me to Live (1960)—to chart a way through the
contemporary world for female characters in search of
sustaining, often same-sex relationships. Following the
posthumous publication of her strikingly original prose,
Doolittle’s reputation was revised and enhanced.
Katherine Mansfield
pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield
Beauchamp, married name Kathleen Mansfield
Murry
born Oct. 14, 1888, Wellington, N.Z.
died Jan. 9, 1923, Gurdjieff Institute, near
Fontainebleau, France
New Zealand-born English master of the short
story, who evolved a distinctive prose style
with many overtones of poetry. Her delicate
stories, focused upon psychological
conflicts, have an obliqueness of narration
and a subtlety of observation that reveal
the influence of Anton Chekhov. She, in
turn, had much influence on the development
of the short story as a form of literature.
After her education (in Wellington and
London), Katherine Mansfield left New
Zealand at the age of 19 to establish
herself in England as a writer. Her initial
disillusion appears in the ill-humoured
stories collected in In a German Pension
(1911). Until 1914 she published stories in
Rhythm and The Blue Review, edited by the
critic and essayist John Middleton Murry,
whom she married in 1918 after her divorce
from George Bowden. The death of her soldier
brother in 1915 shocked her into a
recognition that she owed what she termed a
sacred debt to him and to the remembered
places of her native country. Prelude (1918)
was a series of short stories beautifully
evocative of her family memories of New
Zealand. These, with others, were collected
in Bliss (1920), which secured her
reputation and is typical of her art.
In the next two years Mansfield did her
best work, achieving the height of her
powers in The Garden Party (1922), which
includes “At the Bay,” “The Voyage,” “The
Stranger” (with New Zealand settings), and
the classic “Daughters of the Late Colonel,”
a subtle account of genteel frustration. The
last five years of her life were shadowed by
tuberculosis. Her final work (apart from
unfinished material) was published
posthumously in The Dove’s Nest (1923) and
Something Childish (1924).
From her papers, Murry edited the Journal
(1927, rev. ed. 1954), and he also published
with annotations her letters to him (1928,
rev. ed. 1951). Her collected letters were
edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret
Scott (1984–2008); Scott also edited
Mansfield’s notebooks (1997).
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Dorothy
Richardson
in full Dorothy Miller
Richardson, married name Dorothy Odle
born May 17, 1873, Abingdon, Berkshire,
Eng.
died June 17, 1957, Beckenham, Kent
English novelist, an often neglected pioneer
in stream-of-consciousness fiction.
Richardson passed her childhood and youth
in secluded surroundings in late Victorian
England. After her schooling, which ended
when, in her 17th year, her parents
separated, she engaged in teaching, clerical
work, and journalism. In 1917 she married
the artist Alan Elsden Odle. She commands
attention for her ambitious sequence novel
Pilgrimage (published in separate
volumes—she preferred to call them
chapters—as Pointed Roofs, 1915; Backwater,
1916; Honeycomb, 1917; The Tunnel, 1919;
Interim, 1919; Deadlock, 1921; Revolving
Lights, 1923; The Trap, 1925; Oberland,
1927; Dawn’s Left Hand, 1931; Clear Horizon,
1935; the last part, Dimple Hill, appeared
under the collective title, four volumes,
1938).
Pilgrimage is an extraordinarily
sensitive story, seen cinematically through
the eyes of Miriam Henderson, an attractive
and mystical New Woman. Although the length
of the work and the intense demand it makes
on the reader have kept it from general
popularity, it is a significant novel of the
20th century, not least for its attempt to
find new formal means by which to represent
feminine consciousness.
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Rebecca West
born Dec. 21, 1892, London, Eng.
died March 15, 1983, London
British journalist, novelist, and critic,
who was perhaps best known for her reports
on the Nürnberg trials of war criminals
(1945–46).
West was the daughter of an army officer and
was educated in Edinburgh after her father’s
death in 1902. She later trained in London
as an actress (taking her pseudonym from a
role that she had played in Henrik Ibsen’s
play Rosmersholm).
From 1911 West became involved in
journalism, contributing frequently to the
left-wing press and making a name for
herself as a fighter for woman suffrage. In
1916 she published a critical biography of
Henry James that revealed something of her
lively intellectual curiosity, and she then
embarked on a career as a novelist with an
outstanding—and Jamesian—novel, The Return
of the Soldier (1918). Describing the return
of a shell-shocked soldier from World War I,
the novel subtly explores questions of
gender and class, identity and memory. Her
other novels include The Judge (1922),
Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed
(1936), The Fountain Overflows (1957), and
The Birds Fall Down (1966). In 1937 West
visited Yugoslavia and later wrote Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon, 2 vol. (1942), an
examination of Balkan politics, culture, and
history. In 1946 she reported on the trial
for treason of William Joyce (“Lord
Haw-Haw”) for The New Yorker magazine.
Published as The Meaning of Treason (1949;
rev. ed., 1965), it examined not only the
traitor’s role in modern society but also
that of the intellectual and of the
scientist. Later she published a similar
collection, The New Meaning of Treason
(1964). Her brilliant reports on the
Nürnberg trials were collected in A Train of
Powder (1955). West was created a Dame
Commander of the Order of the British Empire
in 1959. During West’s lifetime, her novels
attracted much less attention than did her
social and cultural writings, but, at the
end of the 20th century, feminist critics
argued persuasively that her fiction was
formally as inventive as that of her female
modernist contemporaries.
Rebecca West: A Celebration, a selection
of her works, was published in 1977, and her
personal reflection on the turn of the 20th
century, 1900, was published in 1982.
Selected Letters of Rebecca West, edited by
Bonnie Kime Scott, was published in 2000.
The critic and author Anthony West was the
son of Dame Rebecca and the English novelist
H.G. Wells.
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Jean Rhys
born Aug. 24, 1890, Roseau, Dominica,
Windward Islands, West Indies
died May 14, 1979, Exeter, Devon, Eng.
West Indian novelist who earned acclaim
for her early works set in the bohemian
world of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s but
who stopped writing for nearly three
decades, until she wrote a successful novel
set in the West Indies.
The daughter of a Welsh doctor and a
Creole mother, Rhys lived and was educated
in Dominica until she went to London at the
age of 16 and worked as an actress before
moving to Paris. There she was encouraged to
write by the English novelist Ford Madox
Ford. Her first book, a collection of short
stories, The Left Bank (1927), was followed
by such novels as Postures (1928), After
Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the
Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight
(1939).
After moving to Cornwall she wrote
nothing until her remarkably successful Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that
reconstructed the earlier life of the
fictional character Antoinette Cosway, who
was Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Tigers Are
Better-Looking, with a Selection from the
Left Bank (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady
(1976), both short-story collections,
followed. Smile Please, an unfinished
autobiography, was published in 1979.
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The 1930s
World War I created a profound sense of crisis in
English culture, and this became even more intense with
the worldwide economic collapse of the late 1920s and
early ’30s, the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War
(1936–39), and the approach of another full-scale
conflict in Europe. It is not surprising, therefore,
that much of the writing of the 1930s was bleak and
pessimistic: even
Evelyn Waugh’s sharp and amusing
satire on contemporary England, Vile Bodies (1930),
ended with another, more disastrous war.
Divisions of class and the burden of sexual
repression became common and interrelated themes in the
fiction of the 1930s. In his trilogy A Scots Quair
(Sunset Song [1932], Cloud Howe [1933], and Grey Granite
[1934]), the novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon (pseudonym of
James Leslie Mitchell) gives a panoramic account of
Scottish rural and working-class life. The work
resembles
Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow in its historical
sweep and intensity of vision. Walter Greenwood’s Love
on the Dole (1933) is a bleak record, in the manner of
Bennett, of the economic depression in a northern
working-class community; and Graham Greene’s It’s a
Battlefield (1934) and Brighton Rock (1938) are desolate
studies, in the manner of
Conrad, of the loneliness and
guilt of men and women trapped in a contemporary England
of conflict and decay. A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), by
George Orwell, are
evocations—in the manner of
Wells and, in the latter
case unsuccessfully, of
Joyce—of contemporary
lower-middle-class existence, and The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937) is a report of northern working-class mores. Elizabeth Bowen’s Death of the Heart (1938) is a
sardonic analysis, in the manner of James, of
contemporary upper-class values.
Evelyn Waugh
in full Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
born October 28, 1903, London, England
died April 10, 1966, Combe Florey, near
Taunton, Somerset
English writer regarded by many as the most
brilliant satirical novelist of his day.
Waugh was educated at Lancing College,
Sussex, and at Hertford College, Oxford.
After short periods as an art student and
schoolmaster, he devoted himself to solitary
observant travel and to the writing of
novels, soon earning a wide reputation for
sardonic wit and technical brilliance.
During World War II he served in the Royal
Marines and the Royal Horse Guards; in 1944
he joined the British military mission to
the Yugoslav Partisans. After the war he led
a retired life in the west of England.
Waugh’s novels, although their material
is nearly always derived from firsthand
experience, are unusually highly wrought and
precisely written. Those written before 1939
may be described as satirical. The most
noteworthy are Decline and Fall (1928), Vile
Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A
Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). A
later work in that vein is The Loved One
(1948), a satire on the morticians’ industry
in California.
During the war Waugh’s writing took a
more serious and ambitious turn. In
Brideshead Revisited (1945) he studied the
workings of providence and the recovery of
faith among the members of a Roman Catholic
landed family. (Waugh was received into the
Roman Catholic Church in 1930.) Helena,
published in 1950, is a novel about the
mother of Constantine the Great, in which
Waugh re-created one moment in Christian
history to assert a particular theological
point. In a trilogy—Men at Arms (1952),
Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and
Unconditional Surrender (1961)—he analyzed
the character of World War II, in particular
its relationship with the eternal struggle
between good and evil and the temporal
struggle between civilization and barbarism.
Waugh also wrote travel books; lives of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1928), Edmund
Campion (1935), and Ronald Knox (1959); and
the first part of an autobiography, A Little
Learning (1964). The Diaries of Evelyn
Waugh, edited by Michael Davie and first
published in 1976, was reissued in 1995. A
selection of Waugh’s letters, edited by Mark
Amory, was published in 1980.
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Lewis Grassic Gibbon
pseudonym of James Leslie
Mitchell
born Feb. 13, 1901, Hillhead of Segget,
Auchterless, Aberdeenshire, Scot.
died Feb. 7, 1935, Welwyn Garden City,
Hertfordshire, Eng.
Scottish novelist whose inventive trilogy
published under the collective title A Scots
Quair (1946) made him a significant figure
in the 20th-century Scottish Renaissance.
Mitchell quit school at the age of 16 and
worked as a junior reporter in Aberdeen and
Glasgow before joining the Royal Army
Service Corps in 1919. He was stationed at
various posts in the Middle East. Discharged
in 1923, he reenlisted in the Royal Air
Force and worked as a clerk in England for
six years. His first book, a work of
nonfiction, was published in 1928. He
published 17 more books—including fiction,
short stories, and history—before his death
six years later. With the exception of his
trilogy and a book on Scotland (written with
poet Hugh MacDiarmid), these books were
published under his real name.
Gibbon published Sunset Song—the first
and perhaps best book of his famous
trilogy—in 1932. It is notable for its
masterful recreation of the rhythms and ring
of Scots without resort to dialect spellings
and Scots vocabulary. He followed Sunset
Song with Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite
(1934). The novels follow the protagonist
Chris Guthrie from her youth in the prewar
Scottish countryside through postwar
depression and economic and social crises;
taken together they trace early 20th-century
Scottish life in all “its sourness, its
harshness, in its beauty, and its sorrow.”
Of Gibbon’s other works, only the
quasi-autobiographical novel The Thirteenth
Disciple (1931) and the novel Spartacus
(1933) are of lasting interest.
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Graham Greene
in full Henry Graham Greene
born Oct. 2, 1904, Berkhamsted,
Hertfordshire, Eng.
died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switz.
English novelist, short-story writer,
playwright, and journalist whose novels
treat life’s moral ambiguities in the
context of contemporary political settings.
His father was the headmaster of
Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended
for some years. After running away from
school, he was sent to London to a
psychoanalyst in whose house he lived while
under treatment. After studying at Balliol
College, Oxford, Greene converted to Roman
Catholicism in 1926, partly through the
influence of his future wife, Vivien
Dayrell-Browning, whom he married in 1927.
He moved to London and worked for The Times
as a copy editor from 1926 to 1930. His
first published work was a book of verse,
Babbling April (1925), and upon the modest
success of his first novel, The Man Within
(1929), he quit The Times and worked as a
film critic and literary editor for The
Spectator until 1940. He then traveled
widely for much of the next three decades as
a freelance journalist, searching out
locations for his novels in the process.
Greene’s first three novels are held to
be of small account. He began to come into
his own with a thriller, Stamboul Train
(1932; also entitled Orient Express), which
plays off various characters against each
other as they ride a train from the English
Channel to Istanbul. This was the first of a
string of novels that he termed
“entertainments,” works similar to thrillers
in their spare, tough language and their
suspenseful, swiftly moving plots, but
possessing greater moral complexity and
depth. Stamboul Train was also the first of
Greene’s many novels to be filmed (1934). It
was followed by three more entertainments
that were equally popular with the reading
public: A Gun for Sale (1936; also entitled
This Gun For Hire; filmed 1942), The
Confidential Agent (1939; filmed 1945), and
The Ministry of Fear (1943; filmed 1945). A
fifth entertainment, The Third Man, which
was published in novel form in 1949, was
originally a screenplay for a classic film
directed by Carol Reed.
One of Greene’s finest novels, Brighton
Rock (1938; filmed 1948), shares some
elements with his entertainments—the
protagonist is a hunted criminal roaming the
underworld of an English sea resort—but
explores the contrasting moral attitudes of
its main characters with a new degree of
intensity and emotional involvement. In this
book, Greene contrasts a cheerful and
warm-hearted humanist he obviously dislikes
with a corrupt and violent teenage criminal
whose tragic situation is intensified by a
Roman Catholic upbringing. Greene’s finest
novel, The Power and the Glory (1940; filmed
1962), has a more directly Catholic theme:
the desperate wanderings of a priest who is
hunted down in rural Mexico at a time when
the church is outlawed there. The weak and
alcoholic priest tries to fulfill his
priestly duties despite the constant threat
of death at the hands of a revolutionary
government.
Greene worked for the Foreign Office
during World War II and was stationed for a
while at Freetown, Sierra Leone, the scene
of another of his best-known novels, The
Heart of the Matter (1948; filmed 1953).
This book traces the decline of a
kind-hearted British colonial officer whose
pity for his wife and mistress eventually
leads him to commit suicide. The End of the
Affair (1951; filmed 1999) is narrated by an
agnostic in love with a woman who forsakes
him because of a religious conviction that
brings her near to sainthood.
Greene’s next four novels were each set
in a different Third World nation on the
brink of political upheaval. The protagonist
of A Burnt-Out Case (1961) is a Roman
Catholic architect tired of adulation who
meets a tragic end in the Belgian Congo
shortly before that colony reaches
independence. The Quiet American (1956;
filmed 1958 and 2002) chronicles the doings
of a well-intentioned American government
agent in Vietnam in the midst of the
anti-French uprising there in the early
1950s. Our Man in Havana (1958; filmed 1959)
is set in Cuba just before the communist
revolution there, while The Comedians (1966;
filmed 1967) is set in Haiti during the rule
of François Duvalier. Greene’s last four
novels, The Honorary Consul (1973; filmed
1983), The Human Factor (1978; filmed 1979),
Monsignor Quixote (1982), and The Tenth Man
(1985), represent a decline from the level
of his best fiction.
The world Greene’s characters inhabit is
a fallen one, and the tone of his works
emphasizes the presence of evil as a
palpable force. His novels display a
consistent preoccupation with sin and moral
failure acted out in seedy locales
characterized by danger, violence, and
physical decay. Greene’s chief concern is
the moral and spiritual struggles within
individuals, but the larger political and
social settings of his novels give such
conflicts an enhanced resonance. His early
novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken
Europe sliding toward fascism and war, while
many of his subsequent novels are set in
remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions,
or other political upheavals.
Despite the downbeat tone of much of his
subject matter, Greene was in fact one of
the most widely read British novelists of
the 20th century. His books’ unusual
popularity is due partly to his production
of thrillers featuring crime and intrigue
but more importantly to his superb gifts as
a storyteller, especially his masterful
selection of detail and his use of realistic
dialogue in a fast-paced narrative.
Throughout his career, Greene was fascinated
by film, and he often emulated cinematic
techniques in his writing. No other British
writer of this period was as aware as Greene
of the power and influence of cinema.
Greene published several collections of
short stories, among them Nineteen Stories
(1947; revised as Twenty-One Stories, 1954).
Among his plays are The Living Room
(performed 1952) and The Potting Shed
(1957). His Collected Essays appeared in
1969. A Sort of Life (1971) is a memoir to
1931, to which Ways of Escape (1980) is a
sequel. A collection of his film criticism
is available in Mornings in the Dark: The
Graham Greene Film Reader (1993). In 2007 a
selection of his letters was published as
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. The
unfinished manuscript The Empty Chair, a
murder mystery that Greene began writing in
1926, was discovered in 2008; it was
serialized the following year.
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George Orwell
"Nineteen Eighty-Four"
British author
pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair
born 1903, Motīhāri, Bengal, India
died Jan. 21, 1950, London
Main
English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm
(1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound
anti-Utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.
Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original
name, but his first book (Down and Out in Paris and London) appeared as
the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful
River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely
attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was
Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s
life-style, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial
establishment into a literary and political rebel.
He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a
minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of
French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in
Burma. Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell
later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social
status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up
in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his
parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school
on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by
his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose,
withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of
those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such,
Such Were the Joys (1953).
Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools,
Winchester and Eton, and chose the latter. He stayed from 1917 to 1921.
Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he
published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of accepting
a scholarship to a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition
and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the
Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at
first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had
wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their
will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed
of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his
experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days
and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant”
and “A Hanging,” classics of expository prose.
In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma,
and on Jan. 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the
imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a
course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having
felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his
mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt
by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of
Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to
live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a
period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels
and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional
vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual
exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.
These experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris
and London (1933), in which actual incidents are rearranged into
something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some
initial literary recognition. Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934),
established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a
sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at
odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main
character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape
from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British
colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in
an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel,
A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a
brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some
agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a
literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty
commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is
reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he
loves.
Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal
rejection of the bourgeois life-style but to a political reorientation
as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an
anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s,
however, he began to consider himself a socialist, though he was too
libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in
the period—of declaring himself a communist.
Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox
political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by
describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and
unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their
lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist
movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger
that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing.
By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain;
he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the
Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising
to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel,
damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his
speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after
having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to
suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear
of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism,
first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage
to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books.
Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative
strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the
nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a
past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and
fascism. When war did come, Orwell was rejected for military service,
and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of
the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British
Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period Orwell was a prolific
journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with
serious criticism, like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on
boys’ weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and
the Unicorn, 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy
of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced
by the British Labour Party.
In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the
story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In
this book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their
exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their
own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the
pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is
even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human
masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than
others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for this
small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945 Animal Farm made him
famous and, for the first time, prosperous.
Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy
and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last
book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after
years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel
is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three
perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the
Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of these
states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel
against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically
distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own
purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then
they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment,
torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him
physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental
existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he
previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother.
Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his
jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the
comprehensive rigour with which it extends the premises of
totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination
over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual
surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and
irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly
being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s warning of the potential
dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries
and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined
words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,”
“doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.
Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house
on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds
of Animal Farm. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for
tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.
George Woodcock
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Elizabeth Bowen
born June 7, 1899, Dublin, Ire.
died Feb. 22, 1973, London, Eng.
British novelist and short-story writer
who employed a finely wrought prose style in
fictions frequently detailing uneasy and
unfulfilling relationships among the
upper-middle class. The Death of the Heart
(1938), the title of one of her most highly
praised novels, might have served for most
of them.
Bowen was born of the Anglo-Irish gentry and
spent her early childhood in Dublin, as
related in her autobiographical fragment
Seven Winters (1942), and at the family
house she later inherited at Kildorrery,
County Cork. The history of the house is
recounted in Bowen’s Court (1942), and it is
the scene of her novel The Last September
(1929), which takes place during the
troubles that preceded Irish independence.
When she was 7, her father suffered a mental
illness, and she departed for England with
her mother, who died when Elizabeth was 12.
An only child, she lived with relatives on
the Kentish coast.
With a little money that enabled her to
live independently in London and to winter
in Italy, Bowen began writing short stories
at 20. Her first collection, Encounters,
appeared in 1923. It was followed in 1927 by
The Hotel, which contains a typical Bowen
heroine—a girl attempting to cope with a
life for which she is unprepared. The Last
September (1929) is an autumnal picture of
the Anglo-Irish gentry. The House in Paris
(1935), another of Bowen’s highly praised
novels, is a story of love and betrayal told
partly through the eyes of two children.
During World War II, Bowen worked for the
Ministry of Information in London and served
as an air raid warden. Her novel set in
wartime London, The Heat of the Day (1949),
is among her most significant works. The war
also forms the basis for one of her
collections of short stories, The Demon
Lover (1945; U.S. title, Ivy Gripped the
Steps). Her essays appear in Collected
Impressions (1950) and Afterthought (1962).
Bowen’s last book, Pictures and
Conversations (1975), is an introspective,
partly autobiographical collection of essays
and articles. Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth
Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and
Diaries 1941–1973 (edited by Victoria
Glendinning), a record of Bowen’s lengthy
affair with a Canadian diplomat, was
published in 2009. The work, which features
her letters and his diaries, provides
insight into Bowen’s sometimes tumultuous
personal life.
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Yet the most characteristic writing of the decade
grew out of the determination to supplement the
diagnosis of class division and sexual repression with
their cure. It was no accident that the poetry of W.H.
Auden and his Oxford contemporaries C. Day-Lewis,
Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender became quickly identified
as the authentic voice of the new generation, for it
matched despair with defiance. These self-styled
prophets of a new world envisaged freedom from the
bourgeois order being achieved in various ways. For
Day-Lewis and Spender, technology held out particular
promise. This, allied to Marxist precepts, would in
their view bring an end to poverty and the suffering it
caused. For Auden especially, sexual repression was the
enemy, and here the writings of Sigmund Freud and
D.H.
Lawrence were valuable. Whatever their individual
preoccupations, these poets produced in the very play of
their poetry, with its mastery of different genres, its
rapid shifts of tone and mood, and its strange
juxtapositions of the colloquial and esoteric, a blend
of seriousness and high spirits irresistible to their
peers.
The adventurousness of the new generation was shown
in part by its love of travel (as in Christopher
Isherwood’s novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains [1935] and
Goodbye to Berlin [1939], which reflect his experiences
of postwar Germany), in part by its readiness for
political involvement, and in part by its openness to
the writing of the avant-garde of the Continent. The
verse dramas coauthored by Auden and Isherwood, of which
The Ascent of F6 (1936) is the most notable, owed much
to Bertolt Brecht; the political parables of Rex Warner,
of which The Aerodrome (1941) is the most accomplished,
owed much to Franz Kafka; and the complex and often
obscure poetry of David Gascoyne and
Dylan Thomas owed
much to the Surrealists. Even so, Yeats’s mature poetry
and
Eliot’s
Waste Land, with its parodies, its satirical
edge, its multiplicity of styles, and its quest for
spiritual renewal, provided the most significant models
and inspiration for the young writers of the period.
The writing of the interwar period had great breadth
and diversity, from Modernist experimentation to new
documentary modes of realism and from art as propaganda
(particularly in the theatre) to conventional fiction,
drama, and poetry produced for the popular market. Two
trends stand out: first, the impact of film on the
writing of the decade, not least on styles of visual
realization and dialogue, and, second, the ubiquitous
preoccupation with questions of time, on the
psychological, historical, and even cosmological levels.
As the world became less stable, writers sought both to
reflect this and to seek some more-fundamental grounding
than that provided by contemporary circumstances.
W.H.
Auden
born Feb. 21, 1907, York, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Sept. 29, 1973, Vienna, Austria
English-born poet and man of letters who
achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero
of the left during the Great Depression.
Most of his verse dramas of this period were
written in collaboration with Christopher
Isherwood. In 1939 Auden settled in the
United States, becoming a U.S. citizen.
Life.
In 1908 Auden’s family moved to
Birmingham, where his father became medical
officer and professor in the university.
Since the father was a distinguished
physician of broad scientific interests and
the mother had been a nurse, the atmosphere
of the home was more scientific than
literary. It was also devoutly
Anglo-Catholic, and Auden’s first religious
memories were of “exciting magical rites.”
The family name, spelled Audun, appears in
the Icelandic sagas, and Auden inherited
from his father a fascination with Iceland.
His education followed the standard
pattern for children of the middle and upper
classes. At 8 he was sent away to St.
Edmund’s preparatory school, in Surrey, and
at 13 to a public (private) school,
Gresham’s, at Holt, in Norfolk. Auden
intended to be a mining engineer and was
interested primarily in science; he
specialized in biology. By 1922 he had
discovered his vocation as a poet, and two
years later his first poem was published in
Public School Verse. In 1925 he entered the
University of Oxford (Christ Church), where
he established a formidable reputation as
poet and sage, having a strong influence on
such other literary intellectuals as C. Day
Lewis (named poet laureate in 1968), Louis
MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, who printed
by hand the first collection of Auden’s
poems in 1928. Though their names were often
linked with his as poets of the so-called
Auden generation, the notion of an “Auden
Group” dedicated to revolutionary politics
was largely a journalistic invention. Upon
graduating from Oxford in 1928, Auden,
offered a year abroad by his parents, chose
Berlin rather than the Paris by which the
previous literary generation had been
fascinated. He fell in love with the German
language and was influenced by its poetry,
cabaret songs, and plays, especially those
by Bertolt Brecht. He returned to become a
schoolmaster in Scotland and England for the
next five years.
In his Collected Shorter Poems Auden
divides his career into four periods. The
first extends from 1927, when he was still
an undergraduate, through The Orators of
1932. The “charade” Paid on Both Sides,
which along with Poems established Auden’s
reputation in 1930, best reveals the
imperfectly fused but fascinating amalgam of
material from the Icelandic sagas, Old
English poetry, public-school stories, Karl
Marx, Sigmund Freud and other psychologists,
and schoolboy humour that enters into all
these works. The poems are uneven and often
obscure, pulled in contrary directions by
the subjective impulse to fantasy, the
mythic and unconscious, and the objective
impulse to a diagnosis of the ills of
society and the psychological and moral
defects of the individuals who constitute
it. Though the social and political
implications of the poetry attracted most
attention, the psychological aspect is
primary. The notion of poetry as a kind of
therapy, performing a function somehow
analogous to the psychoanalytical, remains
fundamental in Auden.
The second period, 1933–38, is that in
which Auden was the hero of the left.
Continuing the analysis of the evils of
capitalist society, he also warned of the
rise of totalitarianism. In On This Island
(1937; in Britain, Look, Stranger!, 1936)
his verse became more open in texture and
accessible to a larger public. For the Group
Theatre, a society that put on experimental
and noncommercial plays in London, he wrote
first The Dance of Death (a musical
propaganda play) and then three plays in
collaboration with Christopher Isherwood,
Auden’s friend since preparatory school: The
Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F
6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Auden
also wrote commentaries for documentary
films, including a classic of that genre,
Night Mail (1936); numerous essays and book
reviews; and reportage, most notably on a
trip to Iceland with MacNeice, described in
Letters from Iceland (1937), and a trip to
China with Isherwood that was the basis of
Journey to a War (1939). Auden visited Spain
briefly in 1937, his poem Spain (1937) being
the only immediate result; but the visit,
according to his later recollections, marked
the beginning both of his disillusion with
the left and of his return to Christianity.
In 1936 he married Erika Mann, the daughter
of the German novelist Thomas Mann, in order
to provide her with a British passport. When
he and Isherwood went to China, they crossed
the United States both ways, and on the
return journey they both decided to settle
there. In January 1939, both did so.
In the third period, 1939–46, Auden
became an American citizen and underwent
decisive changes in his religious and
intellectual perspective. Another Time
(1940) contains some of his best songs and
topical verse, and The Double Man
(containing “New Year Letter,” which
provided the title of the British edition;
1941) embodies his position on the verge of
commitment to Christianity. The beliefs and
attitudes that are basic to all of Auden’s
work after 1940 are defined in three long
poems: religious in the Christmas oratorio
For the Time Being (1944); aesthetic in the
same volume’s Sea and the Mirror (a
quasi-dramatic “commentary” on William
Shakespeare’s The Tempest); and
social-psychological in The Age of Anxiety
(1947), the “baroque eclogue” that won Auden
the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Auden wrote no
long poems after that.
The fourth period began in 1948, when
Auden established the pattern of leaving New
York City each year to spend the months from
April to October in Europe. From 1948 to
1957 his summer residence was the Italian
island of Ischia; in the latter year he
bought a farmhouse in Kirchstetten, Austria,
where he then spent his summers. In The
Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio
(1960), About the House (1965), and City
Without Walls (1969) are sequences of poems
arranged according to an external pattern
(canonical hours, types of landscape, rooms
of a house). With Chester Kallman, an
American poet and close friend who lived
with him for more than 20 years, he
rehabilitated the art of the opera libretto.
Their best-known collaborations are The
Rake’s Progress (1951), for Igor Stravinsky;
Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The
Bassarids (1966), for Hans Werner Henze; and
Love’s Labour’s Lost for Nicolas Nabokov.
They also edited An Elizabethan Song Book
(1956). In 1962 Auden published a volume of
criticism, The Dyer’s Hand, and in 1970 a
commonplace book, A Certain World. He spent
much time on editing and translating,
notably The Collected Poems of St. John
Perse (1972). In 1972 Auden transferred his
winter residence from New York City to
Oxford, where he was an honorary fellow at
Christ Church College. Of the numerous
honours conferred on Auden in this last
period, the Bollingen Prize (1953), the
National Book Award (1956), and the
professorship of poetry at Oxford (1956–61)
may be mentioned.
Assessment.
In the early 1930s W.H. Auden was
acclaimed prematurely by some as the
foremost poet then writing in English, on
the disputable ground that his poetry was
more relevant to contemporary social and
political realities than that of T.S. Eliot
and William Butler Yeats, who previously had
shared the summit. By the time of Eliot’s
death in 1965, however, a convincing case
could be made for the assertion that Auden
was indeed Eliot’s successor, as Eliot had
inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats
died in 1939.
Auden was, as a poet, far more copious
and varied than Eliot and far more uneven.
He tried to interpret the times, to diagnose
the ills of society and deal with
intellectual and moral problems of public
concern. But the need to express the inner
world of fantasy and dream was equally
apparent, and, hence, the poetry is
sometimes bewildering. If the poems, taken
individually, are often obscure—especially
the earlier ones—they create, when taken
together, a meaningful poetic cosmos with
symbolic landscapes and mythical characters
and situations. In his later years Auden
ordered the world of his poetry and made it
easier of access; he collected his poems,
revised them, and presented them
chronologically in two volumes: Collected
Shorter Poems 1927–57 (1967) and Collected
Longer Poems (1969).
Monroe K. Spears
Ed.
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C. Day-Lewis
born April 27, 1904, Ballintubbert,
County Leix, Ire.
died May 22, 1972, Hadley Wood,
Hertfordshire, Eng.
one of the leading British poets of the
1930s; he then turned from poetry of
left-wing political statement to an
individual lyricism expressed in more
traditional forms.
The son of a clergyman, Day-Lewis was
educated at the University of Oxford and
taught school until 1935. His Transitional
Poem (1929) had already attracted attention,
and in the 1930s he was closely associated
with W.H. Auden (whose style influenced his
own) and other poets who sought a left-wing
political solution to the ills of the day.
Typical of his views at that time is the
verse sequence The Magnetic Mountain (1933)
and the critical study A Hope for Poetry
(1934).
Day-Lewis was Clark lecturer at the
University of Cambridge in 1946; his
lectures there were published as The Poetic
Image (1947). In 1952 he published his verse
translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, which was
commissioned by the BBC. He also translated
Virgil’s Georgics (1940) and Eclogues
(1963). He was professor of poetry at Oxford
from 1951 to 1956. The Buried Day (1960),
his autobiography, discusses his acceptance
and later rejection of communism. Collected
Poems appeared in 1954. Later volumes of
verse include The Room and Other Poems
(1965) and The Whispering Roots (1970). The
Complete Poems of C. Day-Lewis was published
in 1992.
At his death he was poet laureate, having
succeeded John Masefield in 1968. Under the
pseudonym of Nicholas Blake he also wrote
detective novels, including Minute for
Murder (1948) and Whisper in the Gloom
(1954).
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Louis MacNeice
born Sept. 12, 1907, Belfast,
Ire.
died Sept. 3, 1963, London, Eng.
British poet and playwright, a member,
with W.H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, and Stephen
Spender, of a group whose low-keyed,
unpoetic, socially committed, and topical
verse was the “new poetry” of the 1930s.
After studying at the University of
Oxford (1926–30), MacNeice became a lecturer
in classics at the University of Birmingham
(1930–36) and later in Greek at the Bedford
College for Women, London (1936–40). In 1941
he began to write and produce radio plays
for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Foremost among his fine radio verse plays
was the dramatic fantasy The Dark Tower
(1947), with music by Benjamin Britten.
MacNeice’s first book of poetry, Blind
Fireworks, appeared in 1929, followed by
more than a dozen other volumes, such as
Poems (1935), Autumn Journal (1939),
Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (1949), and,
posthumously, The Burning Perch (1963). An
intellectual honesty, Celtic exuberance, and
sardonic humour characterized his poetry,
which combined a charming natural lyricism
with the mundane patterns of colloquial
speech. His most characteristic mood was
that of the slightly detached, wryly
observant, ironic and witty commentator.
Among MacNeice’s prose works are Letters
from Iceland (with W.H. Auden, 1937) and The
Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941). He was also a
skilled translator, particularly of Horace
and Aeschylus (Agamemnon, 1936).
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Stephen Spender
in full Sir Stephen Harold Spender
born February 28, 1909, London, England
died July 16, 1995, London
English poet and critic, who made his
reputation in the 1930s with poems
expressing the politically
conscience-stricken, leftist “new writing”
of that period.
A nephew of the Liberal journalist and
biographer J.A. Spender, he was educated at
University College School, London, and at
University College, Oxford. While an
undergraduate he met the poets W.H. Auden
and C. Day-Lewis, and during 1930–33 he
spent many months in Germany with the writer
Christopher Isherwood. Among important
influences shown in his early volumes—Poems
(1933), Vienna (1934), Trial of a Judge, a
verse play (1938), and The Still Centre
(1939)—were the poetry of the German Rainer
Maria Rilke and of the Spaniard Federico
García Lorca. Above all, his poems expressed
a self-critical, compassionate personality.
In the following decades Spender, in some
ways a more personal poet than his early
associates, became increasingly more
autobiographical, turning his gaze from the
external topical situation to the subjective
experience. His reputation for humanism and
honesty is fully vindicated in subsequent
volumes—Ruins and Visions (1942), Poems of
Dedication (1947), The Edge of Being (1949),
Collected Poems (1955), Selected Poems
(1965), The Generous Days (1971), and
Dolphins (1994).
From the 1940s Spender was better known
for his perceptive criticism and his
editorial association with the influential
reviews Horizon (1940–41) and Encounter
(1953–67) than he was as a poet. Spender’s
prose works include short stories (The
Burning Cactus, 1936), a novel (The Backward
Son, 1940), literary criticism (The
Destructive Element, 1935; The Creative
Element, 1953; The Making of a Poem, 1955;
The Struggle of the Modern, 1963), an
autobiography (World Within World, 1951;
reissued 1994), and uncollected essays with
new commentary (The Thirties and After,
1978).
During World War II Spender was a member
of the National Fire Service (1941–44).
After the war he made several visits to the
United States, teaching and lecturing at
universities, and in 1965 he became the
first non-American to serve as poetry
consultant to the Library of Congress (now
poet laureate consultant in poetry), a
position he held for one year. In 1970 he
was appointed professor of English at
University College, London; he became
professor emeritus in 1977. Spender was
knighted in 1983, and he made headlines in
1994 and 1995 when he brought a highly
publicized plagiarism suit against novelist
David Leavitt; the latter was accused of
having borrowed material from Spender’s
autobiography for his novel While England
Sleeps. Leavitt ultimately revised his work,
but not before a vitriolic airing of the
controversy in the pages of the leading
journals in London and New York.
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Christopher
Isherwood
born Aug. 26, 1904, High Lane, Cheshire,
Eng.
died Jan. 4, 1986, Santa Monica, Calif.,
U.S.
Anglo-American novelist and playwright best
known for his novels about Berlin in the
early 1930s.
After working as a secretary and a private
tutor, Isherwood gained a measure of coterie
recognition with his first two novels, All
the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial
(1932). During the 1930s he collaborated
with his friend W.H. Auden on three verse
dramas, including The Ascent of F6 (1936).
But it had been in 1929 that he found the
theme that was to make him widely known.
Between 1929 and 1933 he lived in Berlin,
gaining an outsider’s view of the
simultaneous decay of the Weimar Republic
and the rise of Nazism. His novels Mr.
Norris Changes Trains (1935; The Last of Mr.
Norris) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which
were later published together as The Berlin
Stories, established his reputation as an
important writer and inspired the play I Am
a Camera (1951; film 1955) and the musical
Cabaret (1966; film 1972). These books are
detached but humorous studies of dubious
characters leading seedy expatriate lives in
the German capital. In 1938 Isherwood
published Lions and Shadows, an amusing and
sensitive account of his early life and
friendships while a student at the
University of Cambridge.
The coming of World War II saw not merely
a change of outlook in Isherwood’s writing
but also a permanent change of domicile. He
immigrated to the United States in 1939 and
settled in southern California, where he
taught and wrote for Hollywood films. He was
naturalized in 1946. It was also in 1939
that Isherwood turned to pacifism and the
self-abnegation of Indian Vedānta, becoming
a follower of Swami Prabhavananda. In the
following decades, Isherwood produced
several works on Vedānta and translations
with Prabhavananda, including one of the
Bhagavadgītā.
Isherwood’s postwar novels continued to
demonstrate his personal style of fictional
autobiography. A Single Man (1964), a brief
but highly regarded novel, presents a single
day in the life of a lonely, middle-aged
homosexual. His avowedly autobiographical
works include a self-revealing memoir of his
parents, Kathleen and Frank (1971); a
retrospective biography of himself in the
1930s, Christopher and His Kind (1977); and
a study of his relationship with
Prabhavananda and Vedānta, My Guru and His
Disciple (1980).
From 1953 on, Isherwood lived with a
companion, Don Bachardy, a painter and
portraitist, and both later became involved
in homosexual-rights causes.
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David Gascoyne
born October 10, 1916, Harrow, Middlesex,
England
died November 25, 2001, Newport, Isle of
Wight
English poet deeply influenced by the
French Surrealist movement of the 1930s.
Gascoyne’s first book of poems, Roman
Balcony, appeared in 1932 when he was only
16, and his only novel, Opening Day,
appeared the next year. The royalty advance
for Opening Day enabled him to visit Paris,
which encouraged a passionate interest in
Surrealism. His important introductory work,
A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), and his
verses Man’s Life Is This Meat (1936) were
milestones of the movement in England.
Poems, 1937–42 (1943) marked the beginning
of his religious verse and contains some of
his finest poems, among them his noted
good-bye to the 1930s—“Farewell Chorus.”
Night Thoughts, a long, semidramatic poem,
was broadcast in 1955 and published the next
year.
Gascoyne’s early poetry bears the
Surrealist impress boldly, and, through his
translations of works by Salvador Dalí and
André Breton and his critical writings, he
did much to make the movement known in
Britain. Gascoyne’s Collected Poems 1988
(1988) is a revised and enlarged version,
with autobiographical introduction, of a
volume first published in 1965. His
Collected Verse Translations, chiefly from
the French, was released in 1970. Paris
Journal, 1937–1939 (1978) and Journal
1936–37 (1980), jointly published as
Collected Journals, 1936–42 in 1991, record
the political and artistic movements of the
late 1930s.
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Dylan Thomas
"Poems"
British author
in full Dylan Marlais Thomas
born October 27, 1914, Swansea, Glamorgan [now in Swansea], Wales
died November 9, 1953, New York, New York, U.S.
Main
Welsh poet and prose writer whose work is known for its comic
exuberance, rhapsodic lilt, and pathos. His personal life, especially
his reckless bouts of drinking (he died of an overdose of alcohol), was
notorious.
Thomas spent his childhood in southwestern Wales. His father taught
English at the Swansea grammar school, which in due course the boy
attended. Because Dylan’s mother was a farmer’s daughter, he had a
country home he could go to when on holiday. His poem “Fern Hill” (1946)
describes its joys.
Although he edited the school magazine, contributing poetry and prose
to it, Thomas did badly at school since he was always intellectually
lazy with regard to any subject that did not directly concern him. His
practical knowledge of English poetry was enormous, however. He had
begun writing poems at a very early age, and scholars have shown that
the bulk of his poetic output was completed, at least in embryonic form,
by the time he moved to London at the age of 21. At age 16 he left
school to work as a reporter on the South Wales Evening Post.
Thomas’s first book, 18 Poems, appeared in 1934, and it announced a
strikingly new and individual, if not always comprehensible, voice in
English poetry. His original style was further developed in Twenty-Five
Poems (1936) and The Map of Love (1939). Thomas’s work, in its overtly
emotional impact, its insistence on the importance of sound and rhythm,
its primitivism, and the tensions between its biblical echoes and its
sexual imagery, owed more to his Welsh background than to the prevailing
taste in English literature for grim social commentary. Therein lay its
originality. The poetry written up to 1939 is concerned with
introspective, obsessive, sexual, and religious currents of feeling; and
Thomas seems to be arguing rhetorically with himself on the subjects of
sex and death, sin and redemption, the natural processes, creation and
decay. The writing shows prodigious energy, but the final effect is
sometimes obscure or diffuse.
Thomas basically made London his home for some 10 years from about
1936. In 1937 he married the Irishwoman Caitlin Macnamara, with whom he
had two sons and a daughter. He had become famous in literary circles,
was sociable, and was very poor, with a wife and growing family to
support. His attempts to make money with the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) and as a film scriptwriter were not sufficiently
remunerative. He wrote film scripts during World War II, having been
excused from military service owing to a lung condition. Unfortunately,
he was totally lacking in any sort of business acumen. He fell badly
behind with his income tax returns, and what money he managed to make
was snatched from him, at source, by the British Exchequer. He took to
drinking more heavily and to borrowing from richer friends. Still, he
continued to work, though in his maturity the composition of his poems
became an ever-slower and more painstaking business.
The poems collected in Deaths and Entrances (1946) show a greater
lucidity and confirm Thomas as a religious poet. This book reveals an
advance in sympathy and understanding due, in part, to the impact of
World War II and to the deepening harmony between the poet and his Welsh
environment, for he writes generally in a mood of reconciliation and
acceptance. He often adopts a bardic tone and is a true romantic in
claiming a high, almost priestlike function for the poet. He also makes
extensive use of Christian myth and symbolism and often sounds a note of
formal ritual and incantation in his poems. The re-creation of childhood
experience produces a visionary, mystical poetry in which the landscapes
of youth and infancy assume the holiness of the first Eden (“Poem in
October,” “Fern Hill”); for Thomas, childhood, with its intimations of
immortality, is a state of innocence and grace. But the rhapsodic lilt
and music of the later verse derives from a complex technical
discipline, so that Thomas’ absorption in his craft produces verbal
harmonies that are unique in English poetry.
Meanwhile the London or London-based atmosphere became increasingly
dangerous and uncongenial both to Thomas and to his wife. As early as
1946 he was talking of emigrating to the United States, and in 1947 he
had what would seem to be a nervous breakdown but refused psychiatric
assistance. He moved to Oxford, where he was given a cottage by the
distinguished historian A.J.P. Taylor. His trips to London, however,
principally in connection with his BBC work, were grueling, exhausting,
and increasingly alcoholic. In 1949 Taylor’s wife financed the purchase
of a cottage, the Boat House, Laugharne, and Thomas returned to Wales.
In the following year his first American tour was arranged, and for a
while it seemed as if a happy compromise had been arranged between
American money and Welsh tranquillity.
The prose that Thomas wrote is linked with his development as a poet,
and his first stories, included in The Map of Love and A Prospect of the
Sea (1955), are a by-product of the early poetry. But in Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Dog (1940), the half-mythical Welsh landscapes of the
early stories have been replaced by realistically and humorously
observed scenes. A poet’s growing consciousness of himself, of the real
seriousness hidden behind his mask of comedy, and of the world around
him is presented with that characteristic blend of humour and pathos
which is later given such lively expression in his “play for voices,”
Under Milk Wood (1954). This play, which evokes the lives of the
inhabitants of a small Welsh town, shows Thomas’s full powers as an
artist in comedy; it is richly imaginative in language, dramatic in
characterization, and fertile in comic invention.
Under Milk Wood was presented at the Poetry Center in New York City
in 1953, and its final version was broadcast by the BBC in 1954. In 1952
Thomas published his Collected Poems, which exhibited the deeper insight
and superb craftsmanship of a major 20th-century English poet. The
volume was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic. But,
because of the insistence of the Inland Revenue, his monetary
difficulties persisted. He coped with his exhausting American tours by
indulging in reckless drinking bouts. There were far too many people who
seem to have derived pleasure from making the famous poet drunk. His
personal despair mounted, his marriage was in peril, and at last, while
in New York City and far from his Welsh home, he took such an overdose
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The literature of World War II (1939–45)
The outbreak of war in 1939, as in 1914, brought to an
end an era of great intellectual and creative
exuberance. Individuals were dispersed; the rationing of
paper affected the production of magazines and books;
and the poem and the short story, convenient forms for
men under arms, became the favoured means of literary
expression. It was hardly a time for new beginnings,
although the poets of the New Apocalypse movement
produced three anthologies (1940–45) inspired by
Neoromantic anarchism. No important new novelists or
playwrights appeared. In fact, the best fiction about
wartime—Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (1942),
Henry
Green’s Caught (1943), James Hanley’s
No Directions
(1943), Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude
(1947), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The
Heat of the Day
(1949)—was produced by established writers. Only three
new poets (all of whom died on active service) showed
promise: Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes, and Keith Douglas,
the latter the most gifted and distinctive, whose eerily
detached accounts of the battlefield revealed a poet of
potential greatness. Lewis’s haunting short stories
about the lives of officers and enlisted men are also
works of very great accomplishment.
It was a poet of an earlier generation,
T.S. Eliot,
who produced in his Four Quartets (1935–42; published as
a whole, 1943) the masterpiece of the war. Reflecting
upon language, time, and history, he searched, in the
three quartets written during the war, for moral and
religious significance in the midst of destruction and
strove to counter the spirit of nationalism inevitably
present in a nation at war. The creativity that had
seemed to end with the tortured religious poetry and
verse drama of the 1920s and ’30s had a rich and
extraordinary late flowering as
Eliot concerned himself,
on the scale of The Waste Land but in a very different
manner and mood, with the well-being of the society in
which he lived.
Hugh Alistair Davies
Henry
Green
born Oct. 29, 1905, near Tewkesbury,
Gloucestershire, Eng.
died Dec. 13, 1973, London
novelist and industrialist whose
sophisticated satires mirrored the changing
class structure in post-World War II English
society. After completing his education at
Eton and Oxford, he entered the family
business, an engineering firm in Birmingham;
he worked his way up to become the firm’s
managing director in London. During this
time he produced his laconically titled
social comedies, Blindness (1926), Living
(1929), Party Going (1939), Caught (1943),
Loving (1945), Back (1946), Concluding
(1948), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952).
Underlying the pleasant surfaces of the
novels are disturbing and enigmatic
perceptions. An early autobiography, Pack My
Bag, was published in 1943.
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Patrick Hamilton
born March 17, 1904, Hassocks, Sussex,
Eng.
died Sept. 23, 1962, Sheringham, Norfolk
English playwright and novelist, notable
for his capture of atmosphere and the
Cockney dialect traditionally associated
with the East End of London.
Hamilton began acting in 1921 and then,
fascinated by theatrical melodrama, took to
writing. He became known with the novel
Craven House (1926). A number of successful
motion pictures were based on works by
Hamilton. His play Rope (first performed
1929; U.S. title Rope’s End) was made into a
film by Alfred Hitchcock under the title
Rope (1948). His play Gaslight was
phenomenally successful; first performed in
London in 1938, it was later produced in New
York City under the title Angel Street. Two
film adaptations were made: the first was
British-made, released in 1940 as Gaslight
and rereleased in the United States in 1952
as Angel Street; and the second, released in
1944 in the United States as Gaslight and in
Great Britain as Murder in Thornton Square,
was directed by George Cukor and starred
Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. From
Hamilton’s novel Hangover Square (1941), the
motion picture of the same title (1945) was
made.
Hamilton also wrote novels portraying the
unpleasantness of the modern city: The
Midnight Bell (1929) and The Plains of
Cement (1934), both included in the volume
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
(1935).
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Alun Lewis
born July 1, 1915, Aberdare,
Glamorganshire, Wales
died March 5, 1944, Goppe Pass, Arakan,
Burma [Myanmar]
at his early death one of the most
promising Welsh poets, who described his
experiences as an enlisted man and then an
officer during World War II.
The son of a schoolmaster, Lewis grew up
in a mining valley of South Wales, where he
forged a bond of sympathy with the
impoverished coal miners. Scholarships
enabled him to attend the universities of
Aberystwyth and Manchester. He worked as a
schoolteacher before entering the army
shortly after the outbreak of the war. Most
of the poems in Raiders’ Dawn (1942) are
about army life in training camps in
England, as are the short stories in The
Last Inspection (1942). Ha! Ha! Among the
Trumpets (1945) contains the verse he wrote
after leaving England for military duty in
the East, where he was killed. Letters from
India (1946) and Selected Poetry and Prose
(1966) were also published posthumously.
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Keith Castellain Douglas
born , Jan. 20, 1920, Royal Tunbridge Wells,
Kent, Eng.
died June 9, 1944, Normandy, Fr.
British poet who is remembered for his
irony, eloquence, and fine control in
expressing the misery and waste of war, to
which he was to fall victim.
Douglas’ education at Oxford University was
cut short by the outbreak of war. By 1941 he
was serving as a tank commander in North
Africa, where some of his most powerful
poems were written (Alamein to Zem-Zem,
1946). He was moved back to Britain in 1944
to take part in the D-Day invasion; he fell
in combat in Normandy on his third day
there. His posthumous Collected Poems (1951)
enhanced his reputation as a war poet, but
in 1964 Ted Hughes’s edition of Douglas’
Selected Poems established him as a poet of
universal significance.
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