From the sublime to the miraculous: the great writers who opened up vistas on infinity

How the novel reflected those rare ‘moments of being’ that afford us a fleeting appreciation of the foundations of life, time and identity

For centuries, poets and mystics have undergone sudden insights — epiphanies — that seem separated from the normal flow of everyday perception, and which often have been taken as high points of human experience and the fount of artistic inspiration.

The first novel in English to make significant and extensive use of epiphany, and a major influence on early twentieth century literature, was Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, a fictional biography, published in 1885.

In the early decades of the 20th century, epiphany became a key device in the novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad and Dorothy Richardson, although it was an important presence also in the works of a number of American and European authors, for example, Henry James, Edith Wharton, D H Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust and Hermann Hesse.