(1921) is Aldous Huxley's first novel. Crome is the name of the country house in which it is set. The title puns on the pigment chrome yellow, and evokes the novel's bright pastoral mood as well as the sun that shines for the duration of the narrative, which unfolds over a period of three weeks from July to August 1921.
Huxley's protagonist is the 23-year-old author Denis Stone, who has recently published a “slim volume” of poetry. Denis has fallen in love with Anne, the glamorous, man-baiting niece of Henry and Priscilla Wimbush, the aristocratic owners of Crome. While Denis longs to be a dashing man of action, he is instead an introspective intellectual who, like so many of Huxley's subsequent heroes, is more at home with ideas and books than he is with real people.
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Citation: Poller, Jake. "Crome Yellow". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 August 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6022, accessed 26 April 2024.]
