‘We should have done well, I think, to be satisfied with the aspect of peace’, Virginia Woolf wrote from Richmond on 12 November 1918, describing the grey, wet day that met the armistice of World War I with weary solemnity. Arriving in London, however, the euphoria of the loud and drunken crowds carousing in the rain struck her as nervy and strained. ‘There was no centre, no form for all this wandering emotion to take’, she noted, ‘in everyone’s mind the same restlessness and inability to settle down, & yet discontent with whatever it was possible to do.’ For those who had survived the conflict, jubilation would quickly give way to a growing sense of dislocation and indeterminacy. The confident Edwardian world that had approached war in 1914 had by now dissolved into myth, and, surveying its ruins, modern society faced a crisis of belief and identity.

The disintegration of nineteenth-century assumptions of progress, order and the stability of self and nationhood had, of course, been heralded well before. In the years immediately prior to the conflict, the avant-garde movements of Futurism, Imagism and Vorticism were vociferous in proclaiming their determined dissociation from the past, condemning the enervating effect of bourgeois tradition and rejecting historical consciousness for the immediacy of the modern. Recalling the creative energy of the London literary scene of the time in his memoir Return to Yesterday, for example, Ford Madox Ford depicts the young artist ‘D.Z.’ (a caricature of Wyndham Lewis), exultingly announcing to the older writer: ‘Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact.’