Another Mother

Frank Kermode, 13 May 1993

Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster 
by Nicola Beauman.
Hodder, 404 pp., £20, May 1993, 0 340 52530 4
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... that so many people fail to recognise his greatness, and value him less than, say, James, Conrad, Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, is because they miss his depths, they cannot fathom them unless they present in a frontal, full-dress form.’ It is a matter for regret or possibly indignation that this sentence, absurd in almost every possible way, should have ...

A Toast at the Trocadero

Terry Eagleton: D.J. Taylor, 18 February 2016

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 501 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 7011 8613 5
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... that devotes far more of its time to writers like the Sitwells than it does to Joyce, Pound and Lawrence, all three of whom receive no more than a handful of glancing allusions in the book as a whole. There is a single brief reference to Pound’s Cantos and four mentions of Wyndham Lewis. Sylvia Plath’s name surfaces only twice. The study is rich in ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... desert air and the famous Southwestern ‘light’ – indeed, the whole Stieglitz-O’Keeffe-D.H. Lawrence-Mabel Dodge Luhan-Willa Cather-Pueblo-Cliff-Dwellers-Death-Comes-for-the-Archbishop thing. Maybe we’ll even see Julia Roberts. (The sun-dried actress – a fortysomething Roma tomato in disguise? – has a ranch near Taos.) Our hotel is right on the ...

Shaky Do

Tony Gould, 5 May 1988

Mary and Richard: The Story of Richard Hillary and Mary Booker 
by Michael Burn.
Deutsch, 249 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 233 98280 9
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... he determined to return to the air. In taking this decision, he was critically influenced by T.E. Lawrence, whose work, particularly The Mint, his (then) unpublished account of life in the ranks of the RAF, and personality, one might say, he encountered through the painter Eric Kennington. Hillary had gone to Kennington to have his portrait painted but he got ...

Making strange

John Sutherland, 19 March 1981

Other people 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 223 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 224 01766 7
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The Magic Glass 
by Anne Smith.
Joseph, 174 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 9780718119867
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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 
by Gerald Edwards.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 241 10477 7
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Sharpe’s Eagle 
by Bernard Cornwell.
Collins, 266 pp., £6.50, February 1981, 0 00 221997 2
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XPD 
by Len Deighton.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 09 144570 1
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... University. In the 1920s he worked in the WEA and was obscurely connected with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence. It seems that he wrote, going so far as to describe himself as ‘author’ by profession. What he wrote cannot be traced. From the time of the break-up of his marriage in 1933 to his reunion (unsatisfactory) with his surviving family thirty years ...

Keeping up with the novelists

John Bayley, 20 June 1985

Unholy Pleasure: The Idea of Social Class 
by P.N. Furbank.
Oxford, 154 pp., £9.50, June 1985, 0 19 215955 0
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... which in its turn provokes the repudiation and alienation found, characteristically, in D.H. Lawrence’s autobiographical sketch: ‘One can belong absolutely to no class.’ All classes are prisons. But it may give cachet to have belonged to one, to the working class especially, as it does to have been at a war, or in a real prison. It is commonplace ...

Taking it up again

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 March 1991

Henry James and Revision 
by Philip Horne.
Oxford, 373 pp., £40, December 1990, 0 19 812871 1
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... the desirable ‘probability’ and ‘truth to nature’ that had become the new realism. D.H. Lawrence’s works went through different versions depending on the state of the law – but with Lawrence we can always imagine a paradisal first essential version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance. Jane Austen ...

Yeti

Elizabeth Lowry: Doris Lessing, 22 March 2001

Doris Lessing: A Biography 
by Carole Klein.
Duckworth, 283 pp., £18.99, March 2000, 0 7156 2951 4
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Ben, in the World 
by Doris Lessing.
Flamingo, 178 pp., £6.99, April 2001, 0 00 655229 3
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... Sufism – is often read by literary critics as the symbolic history of our age, just as ‘D.H. Lawrence’s proposal that the Industrial Revolution began in the Eastwood of his boyhood and was finally exorcised in the woods of the Chatterley estate is a received fact of literary education.’ Like Lawrence, Lessing is an ...

Burning Witches

Michael Rogin, 4 September 1997

Raymond Chandler: A Biography 
by Tom Hiney.
Chatto, 310 pp., £16.99, May 1997, 0 7011 6310 0
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Raymond Chandler Speaking 
edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker.
California, 288 pp., £10.95, May 1997, 0 520 20835 8
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... the law, doomed upholder of vanishing virtues; ‘hard, isolate, stoic and a killer’ in D.H. Lawrence’s description of the original of the breed, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking. ‘In a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated’ was how Chandler himself imagined Marlowe’s future. The frontiersman and the private ...

Balzac didn’t dare

Tom Crewe: Origins of the Gay Novel, 8 February 2024

... very largely to the habits and love affairs of homosexuals. Melville’s ‘Billy Budd’ and D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’ are oddly similar – oddly, because Lawrence didn’t know Melville’s story – in that they both depict an older man’s unarticulated, obscure but angry passion for a younger ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
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... Romanticism, as the emblem of the impossible and irresistible search. ‘I started from D.H. Lawrence’s fatal flower of happiness at the end of The Fox, having always wondered how D.H.L. knew it was blue,’ Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to Frank Kermode, who had reviewed The Blue Flower in this paper (‘the more you ...

Madame Matisse’s Hat

T.J. Clark: On Matisse, 14 August 2008

... or manufactured, as opposed to felt. Denis’s ‘artificiality’ points this way. Or D.H. Lawrence’s ‘consciousness’. Here, for example, is the odious Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, rounding on Hermione: ‘Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! … Because you want to have ...

A New Kind of Being

Jenny Turner: Angela Carter, 3 November 2016

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography 
by Edmund Gordon.
Chatto, 544 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 7011 8755 2
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... and valuable and very funny and entertaining. It’s most like – weirdly enough – D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, another book that gets its energy from poking holes in just the right places to release all that built-up sexual tension. (Carter had a lifelong love-hate relationship with ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. Clue: it wasn’t Pound.J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a philologist. He was Reader then ...