A new 'Jane Austen Entertainment', beautifully written and supremely entertaining, in which that monster of unfeeling snobbery, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, familiar to all from Pride and Prejudice, suffers a brush both with death and with the lower orders.

First published over 30 years ago, this book rationalizes the psychological dislocation so characteristic of western creative thinking into a coherent theory of alienation, and defines those afflicted by it as a type: "the outsider". Through the works and lives of various artists - including Kafka, Camus, Hemingway, Hesse, Lawrence, Van Gogh, Shaw, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky - the psyche of "the outsider" is explored.