World Within World

Stephen Spender's autobiography is acknowledged to be one of the most illuminating literary works that have emerged to chronicle the period between the two world wars. In writing it, Stephen Spender was concerned, as he states, with a few recurrent themes: "love, poetry, politics, the life of literature, childhood, travel, and the development of certain attitudes towards moral problems." In the course of the book there are memorable portraits of Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, among many others.