SOURCE: "The Late Nineteenth Century Novel and The Change Towards The Sexual—Gissing, Hardy and Lawrence," in English Studies, Vol. 65, No. 1, February, 1985, pp. 36-47.

In the following essay, Leavis traces changes in the literary representation of sexuality through the works of George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence.

Ever since the real beginnings of the English novel in the eighteenth century, and the evolution of the form as a work of art in the nineteenth, it has been intrinsically involved with the relationships between the sexes in society. This of course has been often enough put forward by critics in the past, with emphases ranging from the balanced and flexible to the purely sociological and the crudely sexual—or more recently, the sexist. Certainly, from the outset where the novelist has been preoccupied with the social, the novel has demonstrated an unrivalled grasp of social reality in...