ABSTRACT
At the close of 'England, My England' the mystified utopian space of Englishness created and cultivated by Egbert is degraded and abjected into the mechanised destruction of the Western Front. And Lawrence goes on to add a seminal meditative paragraph which might serve as an epigraph for this study: This is history. One England blots out another. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. After the Great War, that is to say, the grounds and definitions of Englishness were never to be the same again, irrecoverable to the new generation of the twenties and thirties, whose work is marked by tension, incoherence and stylistic oscillation. The defining identification of Englishness and landscape would be successively replaced, in the twenties and thirties, by such variants as the 'domesticated' strain of detective fiction or the romantic Toryism exemplified by Daphne du Maurier, or later by the 'little Englandism' of the 1950s.
