Traditionally, universities had featured in English fiction only in the kind of Bildungsroman which shows a young man's discovery of life – and himself – at an ancient university: examples include Thackeray's Pendennis, Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, and Evelyn Waugh's sharply contrasting Decline and Fall and Brides head Revisited, with Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer as a rare feminine instance. There was also the peculiarly Oxonian genre of the donnish detective novel. But there were other universities, in London and the provinces, though they did not appear in novels. The expansion of higher education after the Second World War meant that many more young people from lower-middle-class (and, less often, working-class) families went to university, though their attitudes and culture were remote from those traditionally associated with Oxbridge. The provincial and civic universities were now on the map, and in time provided the milieu for a new kind of fiction. As Lodge has described, he was one of the beneficiaries of the new educational opportunities:

Along with the growth of higher education went the expansion of English literature as an academic subject. Traditionally, would be writers who went to university would take degrees in history or classics before embarking on a literary career. After the Second World War young men and women with literary interests and aspirations would be more likely to read English. If they were clever enough they might stay on to do postgraduate work, and then become university teachers themselves, pursuing their writing on the margins of an academic career. David Lodge fitted into this pattern. He became a lecturer in English at Birmingham University in 1960, and was appointed Professor of Modern English Literature in 1976; he finally retired to write full time in 1987. During those years he successfully pursued a double career as a novelist and an academic literary critic.