SOURCE: “The New Novelists,” in English Literature during the Last Half-Century, The Macmillan Co., 1928, pp. 304-30.

In the following excerpt, Cunliffe examines Mackenzie's use of realistic details in his early novels.

Compton Mackenzie, whose parents were well known and highly esteemed under their stage names of Edmund Compton and Virginia Bateman, showed early signs of literary versatility. He had become an editor (of the Oxford Point of View) before he left Magdalen College in 1904, and within a few years after had produced a comedy, published a volume of poems, and written an Alhambra revue. After his marriage he retired to Cornwall, and from this rustic seclusion sent his first novel, The Passionate Elopement, to one publisher after another until it was accepted in 1911 and scored an immediate success. It is “an eighteenth century exercise in concentration and flexibility,” and gives little hint of the very different style and...