Percy Lubbock

Earlham, Percy Lubbock's memoir of childhood summer holidays spent at his maternal grandfather's house, was to win him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1922.

Well-placed socially, his intellectual connections included his Cambridge contemporary E. M. Forster, Edith Wharton (he was a member of her Inner Circle from about 1906), Howard Sturgis and Bernard Berenson.

Lubbock reviewed anonymously in the columns of The Times Literary Supplement some significant modern novels, including Forster's Howards End.

His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ("the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection")[4] became a straw man for writers including Forster, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel.

Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction[5] considers that Lubbock's take on the craft of Henry James was in fact schematizing and formal, if systematic, with a flattening effect.