Introductions and Reviews

by D.H. Lawrence, John Worthen (Editor), N.H. Reeve (Editor)

This volume collects together the introductions and reviews for which D. H. Lawrence was responsible over the whole duration of his writing career, from 1911 to 1930: it includes the book review which was the last thing he ever wrote, in the Ad Astra Sanatorium in Vence. The forty-nine separate items include some of his most compelling literary for example, the fascinating Memoir of Maurice Magnus of 1921–2, his only extended piece of biographical writing. The volume's Introduction not only outlines the literary contacts of Lawrence's career which led him to doing such work, but gives a fresh account of the life of a literary professional who regularly wrote in support of work in which he personally believed, and who also (rather surprisingly) wrote reviews of nearly thirty books. All the texts, including a number previously unpublished in Britain, have been edited and are supplied with extensive explanatory notes.

726 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2004

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Allyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To me, a book like The Peep Show reveals England better than twenty novels by clever ladies and gentlemen. Be absolutely decent in the ordinary sense of the word, be a "holidayist" and a firm believer in niceness; and then set out into the world of all those nice people, putting yourself more or less at their mercy. Put yourself at the mercy of the nice holidaymaking crowd. Then come home, absolutely refusing to have your tail between your legs, but --"singing songs in praise of camping and tramping and the stirring life we jolly showmen lead." Because absolutely nobody has been 'really' nasty to you. They've all been quite nice. Oh quite! Even though you 'are' out of pocket on trip. All the reader can say, at the end of this songful, cheerful book is: God save me from the nice, ordinary people, from ever having to make a living out of them. God save me from being nice"--DH Lawrence, Review of The Peep Show