Afterword
This concluding chapter first turns to Virginia Woolf's famous remark that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’. It examines the problems inherent in taking too seriously Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek claim for December 1910 as a starting point for artistic development in Britain in the twentieth century. The lasting influence of these inflexible interpretations of Woolf's thesis has hampered our understanding of what lies on the other side of this putative watershed. The chapter then re-examines the designation of this period's literature as ‘Edwardian’, and lays out the potentially problematic and misleading nature of this label before conceding that, despite the label's shortcomings, the term ‘Edwardian’ still has its uses.