“So much life with (so to speak) so little living” – thus Henry James disparages the fiction of H. G. Wells during a debate about the nature of the novel that helps to establish the canon of modern fiction. Whereas the canonical modernists – Conrad, Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence – follow James in developing narrative and linguistic innovations to accommodate a newly scrupulous attention to epistemology and psychology, the seven writers surveyed here generally spurn stream of consciousness, often appear indifferent to the exploration of the psyche, and sometimes follow Wells in renouncing Jamesian formal unity. Thus E. M. Forster breaks with modernist practice in relying on a prominent, moralizing narrator, Wyndham Lewis attacks his contemporaries' obsession with interiority, and Wells and Aldous Huxley embrace a didacticism at odds with reigning protocols. Ronald Firbank, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Henry Green follow James in their attention to style, but they depart from modernist orthodoxy in representing surfaces rather than depths. In voice, structure, style, and characterization, however, a rebellious spirit in all these novelists challenges both inherited and emergent ideas of what a novel is and how a novel's prose can read.

H. G. Wells

The author of science fiction adventures, speculative utopias, and social satires, H. G. Wells has come – due in part to James's criticism – to represent precisely those values (materialism) and methods (didacticism) that modernism rejects.