A study of cross-generational literary networks in interwar Britain, this book investigates how writers in the 1930s emerged from the shadow of their older modernist contemporaries such as E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and even ended up shaping their public engagement.

What happens when well-established writers are exposed to a new generation arriving in their wake? How do they respond to the shifting landscape new writers represent? This book reassesses the cultural context of late interwar Britain, focusing on the intergenerational networks of E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, networks which put them directly in touch with the new writers of the 1930s, such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Julian Bell and William Plomer.

This book sheds light on the ways in which these canonical modernists were challenged by their younger peers and impelled to take public stands, emphasizing the potential impact younger generations can have on the development of individuals born decades before them.