ABSTRACT
In Grant Allen. The Downward Path That Leads to Fiction (2000) Barbara Melchiori presents Grant Allen as a neglected figure and points out that no book has
been published about him during the past hundred years.1 There is certainly much to
be gained from rectifying this situation, yet I would not want to suggest that the
neglect is entirely inexplicable. The case for Allen cannot be made on the grounds
that he is a forgotten genius. He was undoubtedly a talented writer; a great deal of
what he wrote still comes across with a clarity and immediacy no longer perceptible
in the work of many of his contemporaries, yet he was never an original. Clearly
much of his large body of work was compromised by the pressures under which it
was written. Allen had to write for money and understood the limitations produced
by this necessity. Yet even when he was finally able to write ‘for the first time in my
life, wholly and solely to satisfy my own taste and my own conscience’,2 as he put it,
Allen remained a perceptive, occasionally brilliant, exponent of the progressive
issues of the day, rather than someone whose insights and formulations transcended
them.
