England in 1919 for Paris, where she married three times.The Left Bank: Sketches
and Studies of Present-Day Bohemian Paris, appeared in 1927, introduced by Ford
Madox Ford, followed by Postures(1928), and Good Morning, Midnight(1939). Back
in Britain, she resurfaced with Wide Sargasso Sea(1966), a ‘prequel’ to Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre: a fictional life of the first Mrs Rochester: the original ‘mad
woman in the attic’. Collections of stories followed:Tigers are Better Looking(1968)
and Sleep it Off, Lady(1976). Perhaps the best of her haunting and economical
novelettes is After Leaving Mr Mackenzie(1930).1928
The funeral of Thomas Hardy took place in Westminster Abbey in 1928, an occasion
worth pausing on as a (belated) sign of the importance of literature in England. His
ashes were escorted to Poets’ Corner by pallbearers including Shaw, Housman and
Kipling, and representatives of Oxford and Cambridge. The first pallbearer was the
Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin; among the mourners was a representative of the
King. Hardy was buried with greater honour than any English writer since. There
may not have been greater English writers since; yet whatever Hardy’s due, the public
honour that was paid him was the honour that England paid to literature itself, in
1928, the year of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.nNon-modernism: the Twenties and
ThirtiesMost of the authors now to be dealt with lived well into the lifetime of the writer of
this History, who attended Eliot’s memorial service. Impartiality is always the aim,
but it is hard to assess the merits of contemporaries, and juniors. Time edits reputa-
tions: the star playwright of the post-war years, Christopher Fry (1907–2005), has
suffered total eclipse, and the poetry of Dylan Thomas, the most popular poet of
that time, has lost its lustre.
Reputations can be revived by republication, though rarely with the success of D.
G.Rossetti’s ‘discovery’ of William Blake. Philip Larkin revived a readership for the
novelist Barbara Pym. Many women writers have been republished in this way, as by
the feminist imprint, Virago. British women modernist writers who have been resur-
rected include Elizabeth Daryush, Mary Butts and Mina Loy. The poetry of Sylvia
Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was published after her death, reviving interest in
her Lolly Willowes(1926) and other fiction. She was a disciplined practitioner of the
antiquarian fantasy fiction of T. F. Powys, and wrote a life of another good writer of
this kind,T.H.White, the author ofThe Sword in the Stone, a children’s book about
King Arthur. Scholarly fantasy fiction has been a continuous tradition from the days
of Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald through to the work of the Inklings,
Tolkien and Lewis (see page 374).
Two hundred thousand books are now published each year in Britain. Which will
last? As an academic expert on the book-trade put it: ‘the nearer one is in time to the
liter ary object, the harder it is to be sure of status’. Until recently, candidates for a
PhD could not write about living authors, a convention which was also observed by
literary historians; for fame is volatile. As Byron put it in 1818:362 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55