ABSTRACT
Rarely can a contemporary view of a literary situation have been so different from a retrospective one as in the year of Lawrence's death, 1930. Looking back from half a century or so on, it seems to mark the end of a great period of English fiction, but at the time matters must have seemed otherwise. Conrad and Hardy, men of an older generation, had died in the previous decade, but there was no reason to believe that Forster would never write another novel nor to foresee that Virginia Woolf's best work was already done; Bennett was still alive and Joyce still writing and surely a younger generation would follow. Most of them are books which make demands on the reader both in terms of the techniques employed and the sympathies demanded; many of them deal with large political, social, and moral issues and they all oblige us to come to terms with newly explored experiences.
