ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the story of how the book came into being, or of how the idea for the book was developed. As Rachel Teukolsky notes, the narrative of that break was scripted by Modernists themselves as when Virginia Woolf memorably quipped that on or about December 1910 human nature changed following the London exhibition of post-Impressionist paintings at the Grafton Gallery the same year. Importantly, Malet's aestheticism was not fuelled by medievalist nostalgia or an anti-modern fixation. As Patricia Lundberg aptly summarizes, on the continuum of literary history from Realism to New Realism or Naturalism, to Aestheticism, to Modernism, Malet was indeed among its innovators, all the while centering her work in social concerns and psychological dilemmas. Following Schaffer, one can thus legitimately claim Malet as a bridge, one of the missing links, between the generation of Eliot and that of Woolf, and assert with Lundberg that the time is finally ripe to 'canonize' Malet.
