VII. Literature of the early 20th century

The Boer War lasted from the II th of October 1899 to the 31st of May 1902. The English suffered many difficul­ ties and losses at the beginning of the war, but they came out of it victors. However, this victory did not improve the negative attitude of progressive people in England towards bourgeois ideology and culture, towards its social life and economic development.

During the 1890s critical realism continued to develop

in the works of many writers. One of them was George Meredith ( 1828-1909). He is considered to be a master of irony. In his novel The Egoist he drew a portrait of a typical representative of the upper strata of English society and revealed the egoism that ruled their lives.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was another critical realist of those years, who analysed the psychology of the bourgeoisie. His best known work is The Way of All Flesh, in which he depicted a clergyman's family, for whom money was the most important thing in life.

Probably the most outstanding novelist of those years was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). He was born and lived most of his life in one of the Southwest rural counties of England, Dorsetshire, which is called Wessex in his novels.

He began by portraying idyllic pictures of country life, and little by little took up tragic themes in such novels as

Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.

In 1891 Hardy wrote Tess of the d'Urbervilles which, as a challenge to puritan bigotry, he called "the story of

a pure woman" It is the tragedy of a poor girl, whose life is broken by the bigotry of society in that period.

Jude the Obscure, which is considered to be Hardy's

best novel, was written in 1895. In it he continued to deve­ lop his theme. Jude, a gifted boy who grows up into a ta­ lented man, goes through life seeing all his hopes and expectations shattered.

He belongs to the lower classes of society and every

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road of life seems to be closed to him. After a life of countless sufferings he dies a young man with the words "Let the day perish wherein I was born" on his lips.

Hardy differed from other critical realists of the 19th

century in that his criticism of bourgeois society developed into a psychology of pessimism. He was one of the last representatives of the old patriarchal farmer's England and saw in the villages the terrible effects of capitalism that spoiled the life of their inhabitants; this gave rise to his tragic world outlook.

A follower of the great traditions of the critical realists, whose life and works span practically a hundred years, is

Ethel Lilian Voynich (1864-1960). She was the daughter of a prominent English mathematician, George Boole. Her mother, Mary Everest, was the niece of a famous

engineer and geographer, George Everest (after whom Mount Everest, the highest peak of the Himalayas was named).

Ethel Lilian Boole studied at the Berlin conservatory

and in 1887-1889 worked in Russia as a governess. In

1890 she married a Polish revolutionary, Wilfrid Michael

Voynich, who fled from tsarist exile to London. All her novels of the end of the century are a reflection of revolu­ tionary movement, for Voynich was very close to Russian members of the "Narodnaya Volia", especially to Stepniak­ Kravchinsky.

The Gadfly ( 1897), her masterpiece, is the story of

a young man, Arthur Burton, one of the leaders in the struggle of the Italian people against Austrian religious

and social oppression during the 1840s. To his un­ derground friends Arthur is known under the name of the Gadfly.

In this novel, one of the strongest among atheist fiction in world literature, we see better than in any of her other

works connection of Voynich's creative art with the revo­ lutionary romantic traditions of English letters. It is not mere chance that Shelley is the favourite poet of Gemma

Warren, Arthur's beloved, that many of Byron's traits are given to the Gadfly, that Arthur's little ditty, written in his last letter to Gemma

For am

A happy [ly,

H I live

Or i[ I die!

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is taken from a verse by William Blake, the forerunner or the romanticists.

The novel is written with courage, all the more notable in that it was finished on the eve of the Boer War, at a time of the most violent imperialist reaction. In the character of the Gadfly Voynich portrayed the main features of pro­ gressive people.

Her peculiarity lies in the exceptional interest she

shows in the lives of other peoples- a fact that is entirely inherited from the romanticists- peoples of Italy, Russia and France. This is her own, special way of expressing her patriotism, for while describing other peoples and other customs she never forgot her own country, just like the great revolutionary romanticists Byron and Shelley

During the last decade of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century three names were prominent among the writers who continued the traditions of critical realism. They were John Galsworthy, Herbert G. Wells and the great playwright Bernard Shaw. All three possessed remarkable individual talent and developed critical rea­ lism along their own, individual lines.

I. What writers continued to develop the traditions of critical realism at tile end of the l9til and tile beginning of the 20th centuries? 2. Who was the main character of Thomas Hardy's best novel? 3. What events arc described in the novel The Gadfly?