Gradually the extreme concern for the individual consciousness characteristic of writers like James has succumbed to collectivist pressures. For all the comparative indifference they received, writers less and less felt able to retreat into private worlds; instead they became increasinly committed to social, political and public comment. E M Forster, one of the most signifiant of twentieth century novelists, explained in a television interview his lack of fecundity as being due such altered pressures..

 Henry James in his earlier novels reflects the impact of European culture on American people. He explored the types and manners of the English scene. But in general his late works developed into a more complex style with meaningful dialogues.

His last three great novels: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904) reflect the contrast between American and European societies, but readers who delighted in the pictorial brilliancy of his earlier work and its neatness of style, must now grope in a world where for all animation of James's figurative speech both meaning and action often hang in suspense. Nevertheless, almost every late work is a gain in dramatic power and lucidity.In his novels James was extending and refining his narrative technique, attempting the unusual.

In his last phase of social understanding stands not very far from Conrad.

There is a consistency about Joyce's life and development as a writer, a coherence and a completness at which he aimed in his work.

Joyce in his earlier works deals with episodes of childhood and adolescence as well as family and public life in Dublin.(Dubliners 1914)

Thus the earlier writings reveal individual moods and characters while his later works concentrate on characters in all their complexity in the various aspects of their family relationship using experimental techniques to convey the essential nature of realistic situations.

Joyce merged in his greatest works the literary traditions of realism, naturalism and symbolism.

The first novel of Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out (1915) is quite traditional in form and the best moments occur when she is being autobiographical. Night and Day (1919) is another conventional, realistic story, showing many of the characteristics that Virginia ridiculed in her criticism of the English realistic novelists. Jacob's Room (1922) marks a development to the use of symbolism and poetic technique and the use of imaginery to connect different moments in the novel as well as to form patterns apart from character and plot, becomes more consistent in Mrs Dalloway (1925).

A link with painting can be noticed in Virginia Woolf’s concern for surface impression and inmediacy which brings Monet to mind.

 It is well known that D. H. Lawrence rejected the traditional canons of structure and method in the novel.Lawrence especially in his late years, wrote too much and too quickly.

Kipling, Conrad and James incorporated into their writing something of the turbulent fascination with impurity which had previously characterized satire and tragedy. Kipling and Conrad continued in this vein until the end of their careers. James, however, changed direction. The notoriously indirect style of his late novels was James's protection against vulgarity. It created moral and literary value by 'making reader's purchase of significance difficult and costly'.