ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Barfield’s still-unpublished novel English People, which Barfield wrote simultaneously with the poems discussed in Chapter 1. The novel is an exploration in fiction of the social, cultural, aesthetic, and literary problems that preoccupy those other works. The chapter shows that it satirizes both the humanism of the previous generation and the avant-garde group gathered in the offices of The New Age, introduces for the first time the mystical themes that will recur throughout his career, and culminates in a neo-Romantic Märchen after the manner of Goethe and Novalis.
