Edwardian fiction

by Sandra Kemp

The Edwardian period was a great age for English fiction. Many classic novels were first published then - Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Lost World; E. M. Forster's A Room with a View and Howard's End; Conrad's Lord Jim and Nostromo; for children, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and A Little Princess and Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Just So Stories; the first of Galsworthy's Forsyte novels, The Man of Property; Erskine Childers's great spy story The Riddle of the Sands; Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger, Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. But alongside these there was a wealth of other writing, much of it forgotten or half-forgotten, some of it unjustly neglected, and all of it important to the literary context in which the enduringly popular works were produced. 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