The Edwardian period was a great age for English fiction. Many classic novels were first published then - Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Lost World; E. M.

Forster's A Room with a View and Howard's End; Conrad's Lord Jim and Nostromo; for children, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and A Little Princess and Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Just So Stories; the first of Galsworthy's Forsyte novels, The Man of Property; Erskine Childers's great spy story The Riddle of the Sands; Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger, Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. But alongside these there was a wealth of other writing, much of it forgotten or half-forgotten, some of it unjustly neglected, and all of it important to the literary context in which the enduringly popular works were produced.

This Companion examines the broad sweep of fiction-writing in the first decade and a half of the century, from 1900 to the outbreak of the First World War - a time when novels in Britain were produced more cheaply, and read more widely, than ever before - providing over 800 author-entries as well as articles on individual books, literary periodicals, and general topics.

With the excitement of the new century came fiction from new sources, which explored new subjects and was read by new audiences. An unprecedented number of women began to publish - they represent nearly half the author-entries here - though many of them chose to do so under noms de plume. Genres such as spy stories, Ruritanian romance, and detective fiction were invented or suddenly came into their own, each with its following of readers.

Significant social developments and themes can be traced both in the Companion at large and via the topic entries, which for the first time allow readers to explore all the novels in a particular genre.