A study of the responses of major English novelists of the early twentieth century to Dostoevsky's work.

This book examines how seven major English novelists--D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, and John Galsworthy--responded to the work of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky in the early years of the twentieth century. Dostoevsky's work provoked heated and exaggerated responses, both positive and negative, from these English writers. A study of their literary and critical reactions to Dostoevsky illuminates their aesthetic and cultural values, and the nature of the modern English novel.