In this wide-ranging work, the author challenges T. S. Eliot's belief that "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates". Davis examines the relation of imagination and the creation of art to the experience of life,both individual and social, which provides the source and subject of so much nineteenth-century literature. In its detailed and closely argued examination of the effects of life experience within the works of a creative writer, this study is in implicit opposition to those current critical trendswhich deny the significance of the writer as a human being. It is thus an important and highly original contribution to literary criticism, which will be valued and argued over by all who are engaged in serious thinking in this field.