The preceding chapters have argued that the shape assumed by beasts in the literature of the late 1880s and 1890s is moulded by the changing identity of Britain at that time. The 1880s were a ‘period of extraordinary transition’. The travels and transformations found in contemporary writing provide a response to those critical years, one that also resonates in more recent surveys and reviews of the period. This is illustrated in the following brief quotation (one of many such), which sums up what much of the foregoing discussion has shown: ‘England in the 1880s was in transition, shedding the skin of Victorianism and moving towards a more modern age.’ The combination of social change, animal imagery, and travel metaphors concisely expressed here encapsulates the main themes of this book.

Before taking stock, let us glance at the forms taken by the early progeny of the beasts we have observed so far. In the main, the next generation, the descendants that inhabited the first third of the twentieth century, quiver from the fear of sex and slaver over the threat of national dissolution. John Lucas writes of the 1920s that: ‘A deep anxiety underlies or is to be found within much writing by men during this period, and one of the ways it shows is in the depiction of women gone feral.’ At the very start of that decade, Edward Heron-Allen's short story ‘The Cheetah-Girl’ was expunged from the collection The Purple Sapphire and Other Posthumous Papers (1921) that it was meant to close. Under the story's title a parenthetical note explains: ‘[The Publishers regret that they are unable to print this M.S.].’

In the title poem of Charlotte Mew's The Farmer's Bride (1916), ‘the young wife flees from her husband's sexual demands and is described in a way that identifies her … with a hunted animal: a leveret in her shyness, her fears, and her “soft, young down”’. Lucas notes that the poem ‘seems to set in … train a number of works in which women become feral creatures’.