ABSTRACT
David Daiches, b. 1912, a prolific critic, is a professor of English at the University of Sussex. He was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago 1939-43 and later taught at Cornell and Cambridge. The catholicity of Daiches's work includes Critical Approaches to Literature (1956) and A Critical History of English Literature (1960), as well as individual books on Virginia Woolf (1942), Robert Louis Stevenson (1947), Robert Burns (1950), Willa Cather (1951), John Milton (1957), and Sir Walter Scott (1971). Following is most of Daiches's Chapter XI, 'Aldous Huxley,' in The Novel and the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 188-210, a chapter omitted by Daiches in the 1960 edition of this book because, as he explains in his Preface, Huxley and Katherine Mansfield 'do not really fit into the general scheme of the book and are not in any case "novelists" in the strict sense' (p. viii). See Introduction, p. 25. Daiches's essay on Huxley as a 'frustrated romantic' may be regarded as a climax to critical objections to Huxley's work thus far. Too, the essay initiates a phase of critical response, to dominate for over a quarter of a century, which finds the value of Huxley's fiction to be limited almost exclusively to its reflection of the frenetic mood of the 1920s. Daiches's account thereby occupies a key position in the shaping of the Huxley critical heritage.
