Introduction

Abstract This introductory chapter sets the widespread modernist fascination with the British aristocracy in the context of the aristocracy’s historical decline, fall, and partial survival in the twentieth century. Drawing on historians who have documented and analysed this phenomenon, the introduction explains how the “unmaking” of the British aristocracy in the modern period provoked various kinds of aesthetic remaking in a wide range of modernist writings, especially in works of fiction. These literary remakings are also related to social, political, and philosophical commentaries of the time. The chapter argues for a reawakening of curiosity about connections between class, status, and literature in the modernist period.