Introduction

In 1923 two important essays appeared, charting the immense changes taking place in fiction: T.S. Eliot’s review “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” What were some of these changes? Eliot and Woolf agree that literature must grow out of the writer’s direct, concrete, emotional experience of life, not out of an abstract, conceptual or moral construct imposed on life. In this sense they both saw their generation, the “Georgian” to use Woolf’s nomenclature, as radically opposed to the past, specifically to Victorian and Edwardian attitudes and literary conventions.