British Fiction in the 1930s

This book studies the literary climate of the British 1930s through a critical assessment of some of its influential and socially representative fiction. The works depict, in various ways, a culture under the stress of seemingly insoluble economic and intensifying international dilemmas, a culture that seems betrayed by the promise of its past and the paralysis of its present. The fiction continues transforming solutions, individual and sexual rebellions as well as the fears and attractions of social and political change. Examples of novelists treated include Richard Aldington, J.B. Priestley, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Patrick Hamilton and Rebecca West.