The Columbia History of the British Novel

Post Office in London in 1834 and was later transferred to Ireland in 1841. His duties in the postal service carried him on trips to Egypt, the United States, and the West Indies. His Post Office career did not stand in the way of his literary endeavors. His first publication was The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), but it was The Warden (1855), the first of the Barsetshire series, that finally won him acclaim. The rest of the series followed: Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). His other great series was known as the «Political» or «Palliser» novels, beginning with Can You Forgive Her? (1864) and continuing with Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1876), The Prime Minister (1876), and The Duke's Children (1880). Trollope is credited with establishing the novel series in English. He was extremely prolific, producing an astonishing number of novels, including The Bertrams (1859), The Belton Estate (1866), He Knew He Was Right (1869), The Way We Live Now (1875), The American Senator (1877), and Mr. Scarborough's Family (1883).

Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

The fourth earl of Orford, Walpole was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge. He spent a period of his young adulthood traveling through Europe with his friend Thomas Gray, and then he was elected to Parliament from Callington, Castle Rising, and Lynn. After settling in the house known as Strawberry Hill and starting his own printing press, Walpole began to publish his own work as well as Gray's. His most notable works remain A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (1758), Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), and The Castle of Otranto (1764).

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)

Waugh was educated at Hertford College, Oxford, and proceeded to work as an assistant schoolmaster until his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), was published to wide acclaim. After a brief marriage, Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930. His early novels were successful works of satire: Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). Waugh was also an accomplished travel writer who produced pieces on Africa (Remote People, 1931) and South America (Ninety-two Days, 1934). His later novels include the celebrated Brideshead Revisited (1945), The Loved One (1948), and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), a hilarious self-parody.

Fay Weldon (1933-)

Born in Worcester, Weldon was educated at the University of St. Andrews and worked in advertising. After devoting herself to writing she began working in -1013- theater and television, but it is for her novels that she is best known. Her novels mix the heady feminism of the 1970s with both comedy and tragedy. The novels include The Fat Woman's Joke (1967), Down Among the Women (1971), Female Friends (1975), Praxis (1978), and Puffball (1980).

H. G. Wells (1866–1946)

Apprenticed at fourteen to a draper in Bromley, Kent, Wells won a scholarship to study with T. H. Huxley and graduated from the University of London in 1888. A high school teacher of biology until 1893, Wells began a career as a prolific writer with novels that initiate the modern subgenre of science fiction: The Time Machine (1895), The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he turned to realism and political and social issues, and these books of his middle period include Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), Ann Veronica (1909), The History of Mr. Polly (1910), and The New Machiavelli (1911). In the last part of his life, Wells wrote novels advocating his ideas such as The World of William Clissold (1926), and these are generally considered inferior to his earlier work.

Dame Rebecca West (1892–1983)

Educated in Edinburgh, and for a brief time in London, West adopted her name at the age of nineteen from a character in an Ibsen play. Her ardent feminism was expressed in journals such as the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, and the Clarion. Her novels include The Return of the Soldier (1918), The Judge (1922), The Strange Necessity (1928), Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), The Fountain Overflows (1956), and The Birds Fall Down (1966). She also published widely on topics as diverse as Yugoslavia and the Nuremberg trials.

Angus Wilson (1913–1993)

Wilson was born in Durban, South Africa, and was educated at Merton College, Oxford. His nonliterary career included stints at the Foreign Office and as deputy superintendent of the Reading Room of the British Museum. His early writings were mostly short stories until he published Hemlock and After (1952). This was followed by a steady stream of witty and satirical works that sometimes edge into black humor: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958), The Old Men at the Zoo (1961), Late Call (1964), No Laughing Matter (1967), As If by Magic (1973), and Setting the World on Fire (1980).

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

One of Britain's greatest and earliest feminists, Wollstonecraft first made her name with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). After spending some -1014- time in Ireland, she returned to write reviews and translations for the publisher J. Johnson. During a period in which she moved among the circle of Godwin, Holcroft, and Fuseli, she published her greatest works: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a piece in reply to Burke; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her most important; and a novel, Mary (1788). She had a daughter in Paris by the American writer Gilbert Imlay, but later married Godwin, with whom she had Mary Shelley.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

The daughter of the English essayist and historian Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Stephen was educated at home and read widely in her father's huge library. After she married the critic Leonard Woolf in 1912, they moved to the London district called Bloomsbury, and their home became a center for the artists, thinkers, and writers who have come to be called the Bloomsbury Group. She and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), was relatively conventional, but the works that followed such as Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922) featured an innovative lyricism and complex narrative structure. With the publication of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), Woolf perfected her radical departures from the traditional English novel and established herself as one of the central figures of the modernist movement. In spite of serious psychological problems that had led to mental breakdowns in 1895 and 1915, Woolf wrote many essays and book reviews, as well as more conventional, lighter novels such as Orlando (1928) and The Years (1937). Among her most important critical volumes are the classics of modern feminism A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Shortly after finishing her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Woolf committed suicide.

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Notes on Contributors

Gillian Beer is Professor of Literature and Narrative at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Her publications include Darwin's Plots, George Eliot, and Arguing with the Past.

John Bender is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author most recently of Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, which was awarded the Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies in 1987.

Toni O'Shaughnessy Bowers teaches eighteenth-century literature and women's studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published essays on eighteenth-century subjects and is currently completing the manuscript of her book entitled 'Making Motherhood: British Literature and Middle-Class Maternal Ideals, 1680–1760.'

Patrick Brantlinger is Professor of English and chair of the department at Indiana University. His most recent books are Rule Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 and Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America.

Jill Campbell teaches English at Yale University. She is the author of Natural