Novelists grapple throughout the twentieth century with concerns related to identity and belonging. After the “Windrush generation” and the winding down of the British Empire, the headline treatments of identity had chiefly to dowith multiculturalism in an era of postcolonialism. This chapter addresses a different matter: the tension between local allegiances and broader allegiances. How is regional belonging in the twentieth century understood, and how does it fit with national affiliation? How have novelists continued the tradition of regional fiction, and how has “English” identity in relation to place been complicated by the intersecting concerns of the “four nations,” especially where Irish, Welsh, and Scottish nationalisms have greater popular impetus than any pursuit of Englishness?

Regional fiction has conventionally been associated with rural experience or with experience focussed on provincial towns in rural settings. (There is an additional complication here, in that regionalism and provincialism are overlapping terms.) In the context of the twentieth-century English novel, regionalism has its heyday in the 1930s, and is usually deemed to have tailed off after the Second World War. A commonsense explanation for the apparent decline of the regional novel in Englandmight be that the idea of regionalisminevitably changes with the improvement of modes and routes of travel, which have meant that regions are less self-contained than they were.