Perhaps the most forgotten of the novelists who seemed important between the wars is Aldous Huxley. He had a most distinguished pedigree, being descended from T. H. Huxley who had been the companion in arms of Charles Darwin when he battled the Creationists to establish the principle of evolution. Huxley's father was the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, when such commentaries on literature and life were influential, and his brother was the famous scientist Julian.

In the twenties, however, Aldous Huxley seemed destined to outstrip them all. David Cecil, in comparing his own contemporaries to the great Victorian novelists, noted that those earlier prodigies had to cover every aspect of fiction, whereas in modern times individuals specialized in particular areas. Thus, if I remember right, Galsworthy dealt with social change while Virginia Woolf created a dazzling tapestry of words. But most important as it seemed to me at the time was Aldous Huxley, who was said to be the great exponent of the novel of ideas.

I am not so sure now, unlike in my naïve teens, that the life of the intellect is quite so significant. But at the time, I wondered too about the characterization, since much of Huxley's work seemed to me simply a more serious version of the country house conversation fiction that other writers had made familiar. In fact, I thought he was more in the line of that long forgotten novelist of the Romantic period, Byron's contemporary Peacock, who wrote romps such as Crotchet Castle.