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).

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 somber 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.

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 favor 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.

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.

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 theater) 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.