All of the writers covered by this study illustrate what Marshall Berman calls the ‘dual character’ of modernist art and thought: ‘they are at once expressions of and protests against the process of modernisation.’ These expressions take various forms, including cosmopolitan style and imagery, a technology-inspired expansion of perspectives, and a defamiliarised understanding of place, facilitated in part by the increasing transience of the period under consideration. Yet while Lawrence, Powys, Butts and Woolf all draw upon modernity in these ways, their work also protests against modernisation, insofar as it threatens their sense of place. Lawrence is the figure in whom the need for resistance or protest feels most acute. As Peter Fjagesund explains, his work expresses a sense of besiegement by developments of his time:

The growth of heavy industry, mass urbanisation, and the increasing incursions of the state into private life are among the processes which come into direct conflict with the strong sense of place and tradition that marks all of my subjects. As J.R. Watson notes, Lawrence's early work (particularly The White Peacock) demonstrates a ‘lovely openness’ to his home region; he is ‘undoubtedly struggling to express something about the world around him’, and he tells Jessie Chambers of the novel: ‘Everything that I am now, all of me, so far, is in that.’ At the beginning of the period upon which this book has focused, it is still possible for this sense of intimate connection with a specific region to underpin Lawrence's fiction. From this point onwards, however, his work does not merely resist ‘the process of modernisation’, but expresses it (albeit in complex, ambivalent ways): his literary consciousness, and the landscapes through which he realises it, expand accordingly.