In anticipating the topics that might preoccupy novelists and critics in the twenty-first century, it is helpful to reflect briefly on the half-century leading up to the millennium. If the novel is buoyant in 2000, this was by no means the case at the beginning of the period. In the late 1940s the novel in Britain was widely held to be in a state of crisis, principally because the evolving post-war society began to divest itself of its erstwhile principles of cohesion. The self-proclaimed values of the British at war – the tenacity, independence, and moral rectitude of an island people combating an evil dictator – had to be reconsidered in the face of burgeoning change. The certitudes of racial and national identity, gender roles, class, and the integrity of the countryside were all coming under pressure. In the second half of the twentieth century each of these benchmarks had to be recalibrated entirely; for the novelist, this presented all manner of opportunities for imaginative intervention in vertiginous social change, so that the perceived social disintegration that had made the novel seem moribund in the 1940s, seems, with hindsight, to have heralded the arrival of a revitalized culture and society as the century progressed. The novel of society in Britain can be said to have enjoyed a period of renaissance, even a period of unparalleled creativity, in the years 1950–2000. This renaissance, however, has not always been characterized by dramatic innovation.