Key 20th Century British and Irish Authors

Posted on May 4, 2025 in English Studies

Joseph Conrad

Biography

  • Born in Poland as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.
  • From landowning aristocracy.
  • Family went into exile when he was three.
  • Sailor on French vessels.
  • Arrived in Britain at the age of 21.
  • Member of the British Merchant Service.

Works and Themes

  • Did not use original themes for stories, but reshaped them with his own technique.
  • Heart of Darkness (1902):
  • Voyage up the Congo into the heart of Africa.
  • Story told by Marlow.
  • Received huge critical attention.
  • No simple reading; requires effort of interpretation.
  • Time pace is broken.
  • Imagery: black – white, dark – light; ivory.
  • Lord Jim: Complex method of indirect narration.

Technique

  • Friend and follower of Henry James regarding style, but with a different atmosphere.
  • Marlow as a narrator:
  • Helps to dramatize the action.
  • Compels us to see it through his eyes.
  • Provides an intense focus.
  • Allows Conrad to make overt comments.

E. M. Forster

Biography

  • Brought up by his mother in a sheltered environment.
  • Attended King’s College, Cambridge.
  • Travelled to Greece, Italy, Alexandria, and India.
  • Worked for several liberal causes.
  • President of the Council for Civil Liberties.
  • President of the Humanist Society.
  • His opinions about the art of fiction were published in Aspects of the Novel.

Key Works

  • Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
  • The Longest Journey
  • Maurice: Homosexual love story.

Literary Standing

  • Modernist writer?
  • Virginia Woolf associated him with herself, Lawrence, and Joyce.
  • Other critics consider him an Edwardian writer, not a pioneer of modernism.

D. H. Lawrence

Biography

  • Son of a Nottinghamshire miner.
  • Encouraged to get an education by his mother.
  • Became a schoolteacher.
  • Very class-conscious.
  • Tendency to show a tone of moral superiority.

Novels and Topics

  • Sons and Lovers:
  • Depicts a mining community from within.
  • Working-class father – middle-class mother.
  • Mother – son’s lover (autobiographical elements).
  • Technique: traditional rather than experimental.
  • Uses dramatic scenes plus authorial commentary.
  • Topics:
  • Provincial life.
  • Harmonization of intellectual and emotional forces in human nature.
  • Primitivism.

Style

  • Aloof from his characters.
  • Uses authorial reporting or dramatisation.
  • Occasional use of Free Indirect Style.
  • Some critics doubt his ‘modernism’.

James Joyce

Biography

  • Born in Dublin, Ireland.
  • Educated by the Jesuits for priesthood.
  • Did not take part in the Irish Literary Revival.
  • Exiled to the continent from 1904.
  • Lived in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich.
  • Worked as a bank clerk and teacher in Berlitz schools.

Works and Themes

  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916):
  • Based on Stephen Hero, partly autobiographical.
  • Bildungsroman / Künstlerroman – Evolution of the protagonist’s language.
  • Focus on the mind of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus.
  • Stephen Dedalus → artist as an outcast.
  • Stephen: first Christian martyr.
  • Daedalus: craftsman, labyrinth, and flight.
  • Ulysses (1922):
  • Published in Paris, suppressed in Britain and the United States.
  • Covers one specific day in the life of Leopold Bloom (Ulysses).
  • Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus).
  • Molly Bloom (Penelope).
  • The most thoroughly documented novel in English, set in Dublin.
  • Often called a ‘guide-book’ due to great detail.

Technique

  • Uses straight narrative and interior monologue (by Bloom and Stephen).
  • Later sections use parody, pastiche, symbolic fantasy, and narration by question and answer.
  • The three main characters are known from the inside, but in different ways.
  • Uses third-person narrative.

Virginia Woolf

Biography

  • Daughter of critic and writer Sir Leslie Stephen.
  • Mother died in 1895 and father in 1904.
  • Suffered continuous breakdowns since the age of 13.
  • Died by suicide in March 1941.
  • Writer of reviews and articles in The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement.
  • Lived in Bloomsbury.
  • Part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ of artists and intellectuals (Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell).
  • Founded The Hogarth Press in 1917 with Leonard Woolf.

Novels and Characters

  • Characters show awareness of the moment.
  • Focus on thoughts, feelings, mood.
  • Apprehension of the physical world around.
  • Uses interior monologue.
  • Jacob’s Room (1922): Received a negative review by Arnold Bennett.
  • To the Lighthouse (1927):
  • Often considered her best book.
  • Partly autobiographical (Ramsay family).
  • Structured in three parts.
  • Set near the Isle of Skye.
  • Uses shifting point of view.