The lives of the authors.

How generations shape literature.

I have recently appeared in a few podcasts.

Brian Chau

and I talked about the literary moment (are there any men publishing novels?) and Macbeth. Brian had great questions and we really got into it with Shakespeare.

Alex Dobrenko`

got me ranting about philistines, taste, and Samuel Johnson. We had a good laugh. With Michael Newborn I talked about late bloomers.

If you want to hear me talk irl, I’ll be at Bell House next month, in south London.

More soon!

---

I am delighted to bring you this written discussion between me and

Julianne Werlin

, who writes one of my favourite Substacks

Life and Letters

. Julianne mentioned in a recent post that she was researching and writing about literary generations, and that is what we discuss. How can thinking about writers in generations help us understand literature and literary history? Is demography destiny for novelists?

Enjoy!

---

Henry

Julianne, Hello!

You said something in your Substack post today that caught my eye.

I’m currently in the early stages of thinking about a generational history of literary authors. I’m more sympathetic than most to the idea that generations might be, if not exactly the key to all mythologies, at least one digit in that vast, combinatorial code.

So many names start crowding my imagination when I think of this. Tell me, what’s your basic theory of literary generations?

---

Julianne

Thanks for starting this conversation, Henry!

My interest in the idea of literary generations emerges from my love of biographical literary criticism, which I know we both share. When we read good literary biographies, or even when we think about the work of a particular author we know well, we understand intuitively that their work has a certain arc of development that’s shaped by their life and is also fully part of that life. We know very well that they write at first as a young man or woman with a certain position in the world, then as an older man or woman, still shaped by earlier experiences but now with a different role and perspective.

But when we scale up to look at literary history—the history of many authors and many books—that sense of the entanglement of work and life often vanishes, as does the complex, layered sense of the decades of experience that may have shaped the publications of a single year. Instead, we tend to look at the immediate events surrounding a literary moment, and we also remove or bracket biographical elements. As a result, we’re often left with an impoverished sense of temporality, as well as deep cleavages between text and context. For me, the appeal of generational thinking is that it’s a way of considering literary history that preserves the centrality of the author and the course of the life, even as we begin to think about many lives rather than just a few, and the passage of centuries rather than decades.

It’s also a way of understanding how literary change happens. In the majority of generational theories, the birth of new people and the death of old people is a major mechanism of social change. It’s certainly not that older people can’t produce novel works or ideas, as you’ve shown in Second Act. But for most people, the first encounter with the world, in all its multiplicity and strangeness, is a formative one. 

---

Henry

I often think that one of the interesting things about major authors is when they span generations. Jacobean Shakespeare competing with a new generation, for example. Dickens and the new modes of realism and sensationalism. The ambivalent combination of both ability or inability to integrate with a new generation, a new mode, can have wonderful results.

When Penelope Fitzgerald started writing novels, in her sixties, for example, she felt that her world had vanished. Writing to a friend in 1998, when she was in her eighties, she said, “I suppose it’s ridiculous to regret the Liberal Party, the Church of England, Lyons tea shops, Carter Paterson, telegrams and so on, but so many of them seemed to disappear at once.” She was, in many ways, quite modern, but she harked back.

This nostalgia was the imaginative spirit that gave her novels so much magic. She is a writer of lost worlds. But it also made her less exciting than Martin Amis and his leather jacket. Something similar happened to Elizabeth Jenkins, whose best book, The Tortoise and the Hare, is similarly of another time, and was released in 1954, the year of Lucky Jim. But again, her advantage was that she had the “pre-war” quality so many people at that time missed in their clothes, and perhaps, sometimes, their novels…

So tell me, how will a literary history of generations be different from what we are used to? Are you talking about prosopography, or about something more individuated?

---

Julianne

I do find generational approaches to individual authors interesting. As your examples suggest, thinking generationally might be most revealing for late works, which are often shaped by decades of experience. For me, Milton, who described himself as “long choosing and beginning late,” comes instantly to mind. Paradise Lost, composed when he was in his late fifties, encapsulates thirty years of social and intellectual transformations, culminating in a reaction against the politics and aesthetics of his own moment, the Restoration. Of course, no one would treat Paradise Lost as a typical poem of the 1660s: the whole point is that it’s not! But many more conventional late works—ones that weren’t written in the ashes of a revolution—may have an equally complex and ambivalent relationship to their own moment. 

For me, though, the real interest in this approach lies in thinking about how genres and styles form and change within and across generations. Prosopography will play a role, but so will generational succession. We might think, for example, about the relationship between the generation of novelists born in the 1760s and 70s, including Maria Edgeworth (1768), Walter Scott (1771), “Monk” Lewis (1775), Jane Austen (1775), and Fanny Trollope (1779), and the generation born in the 1810s: Thackeray (1811), Dickens (1812), Trollope (1815), Charlotte Brontë (1816), Emily Brontë (1818), and George Eliot (1819). The former group shaped the historical novel, the gothic novel, and social comedy. Their works, in turn, formed the youthful reading of the younger generation, who drew on their predecessors’ techniques in a new, more radical era to create the English social novel. In Trollope’s case, of course, the generational relationship was a biological as well as literary one: Fanny Trollope was his mother. 

We’re used to thinking of these authors as landmarks in literary history. But I think we could do much more to integrate the intimate details of their life course—biography and demography—with the history of their literary works. Generations, after all, are how literature imagines the stakes of historical change. Think of the family dramas of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare’s plots of political succession, or the Bildungsroman. Writers understand that ideas are born and die with human beings, and that every process of intellectual change is also a process of generational change. Demographic history is much closer to the center of literature than we might imagine.