This article frames Brexit as the consequence of social and demographic fissures running through the United Kingdom, thereby arguing that Britain’s exit from the European Union is symptomatic of a specifically English rather than British crisis of national identification. It shows how such internal faultlines within the UK’s society intersect with the evocation and employment of various kinds of border imagery and border discourses in the run-up to the Brexit Referendum in 2016. For the main part of the analysis, the article sets out to broaden the by now well-established genre of “BrexLit” (Shaw, Everitt) by focusing on what could be called “Pre-BrexLit,” that is, novels written well before Brexit became a term, let alone political reality. By way of three exemplary texts—Julian Barnes’s