Barrie was the only new theatrical talent, with The Admirable Crichton (1902) and
What Every Woman Knows (1908). The Abbey Theatre opened in Dublin in 1904 to
the plays of Synge and Yeats. A wider world appears in the novels of Henry James
and Joseph Conrad, with more knowledge of good and evil.
nFiction
Edwardian realists
Rudyard Kipling
In Kipling’s Kim (1901) a wide world is seen through the eyes of a street-wise unpre-
judiced child: ‘He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah
on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the
natives call the Lahore Museum.’ Readers of the Empire’s favourite author were
delighted by this novel of adventure, with its glimpses of India’s human and religious
variety. Kipling, like his Irish-Indian orphan, Kim, could say ‘Thanks be to Allah who
gave me two / Separate sides to my head.’ Many heads can be inhabited by readers
of his five adult short story collections, and many different worlds experienced – in,
for example, ‘Regulus’, ‘Aunt Ellen’, ‘Dayspring Mishandled’, ‘The Church that was at
Antioch’ and ‘The Janeites’. Many of the stories are dramatic monologues voicing
unfamiliar prejudices without authorial censorship.
His imperialism means that Kipling was for too long out of fashion, though his
uncanny skills make him ‘a writer impossible to belittle’ (T. S. Eliot). Henry James
thought him the completest example of a genius. He is as clear as but less simple
than H.Rider Haggard, Henry Newbolt and John Masefield.Puck of Pook’s Hill is
original, combining the fairy Puck with the lives of those who worked a Sussex
valley under each invader over two millennia. There was a new southern pastoral-
ism:Sussex was home to Kipling and Belloc, Kent to James, Conrad, Ford and
Wells.
John Galsworthy
The domestic novel was dominated by John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and H. G.
Wells.John Galsworthy(1867–1933), the son of a solicitor – like Housman and
Bennett – is known for a series of novels, beginning with A Man of Property (1906),
about the stockbroking Forsyte family, tracing their fortunes, financial, marital and
artistic, through changing times. This detached chronicle became less satirical over
twenty-three years. His plays,The Silver Box,Strife and Justice, address social issues
in a moral spirit. His conventional decency can be judged from his impression of
Conrad (see p. 331).
Arnold Bennett
Arnold Bennett(1867–1931) was the best businessman of letters since Dickens: he
wrote journalism, reviewed for the Evening Standard, turned out entertainments like
The Grand Babylon Hotel, and composed solid, steady, sensitive novels of provincial
life in Fre nch realist detail, most strikingly in The Old Wives’ Tale; his reputation is
reviving. He bought a steam yacht, which to Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound
and Virginia Woolf was the mark of the beast. Kipling and Wells drove large new
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