Edwardian Fiction

The Edwardian age was a great time for English fiction. Many classic novels, some of them subsequently adapted for film and television, were first published then - Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles; E. M. Forster's A Room with a View; Conrad's Lord Jim; and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, to name just a few. Alongside these was a wealth of other writing often unjustly neglected but now of renewed interest. This Companion examines the broad sweep of...
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The Edwardian age was a great time for English fiction. Many classic novels, some of them subsequently adapted for film and television, were first published then - Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles; E. M. Forster's A Room with a View; Conrad's Lord Jim; and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, to name just a few. Alongside these was a wealth of other writing often unjustly neglected but now of renewed interest. This Companion examines the broad sweep of fiction-writing in the first decade and a half of the century, from 1900 to the outbreak of the First World War - a period when novels in Britain were produced more cheaply, and read more widely, than ever before. It offers over 800 author-entries - nearly half of them women - as well as numerous articles on individual works, literary periodicals, and general topics. With the excitement of the new century came fiction from new sources, which explored new subjects and was read by new audiences. Significant social developments and themes can be traced both in the Companion at large and via the topic entries, which for the first time allow the reader to explore all the novels in a particular genre. From James's The Ambassadors to Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, from J. H. Abbott to Israel Zangwill, from the Boer War to Suburban Life, Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion offers unique access to the books, writers, and preoccupations of a fascinating literary era.