David Lindsay is a little-known writer. When he died in 1945, in his house on the outskirts of Brighton, it was difficult not to accept the evidence: his writing career had been a failure in many respects. His books, apart from the first two, had encountered great difficulty in finding a publisher. Public reaction had been luke-warm. None of Lindsay's novels had been republished during his lifetime.

The fact that his writings were not well-received by either publishers or the general public, however, did not mean that his name remained unknown within a literary circle of critics and other writers, amongst whom could be mentioned Robert Lynd, E. J. King Bull and Roger Lancelyn Green. At the time Lindsay's books appeared, literary critics did not fail to emphasise his shortcomings; nevertheless, there clearly emerges from these reviews the conviction that Lindsay was a writer worthy of interest. L. P. Hartley, Rebecca West, Hugh L'Ansson Fausset and J. B. Priestley are a few of the celebrities of that time who declared themselves impressed by the force of certain passages, the power of the imagination, and the originality of thought.

These qualities must, moreover, have been confirmed by the unconcealed interest shown in Lindsay's work by two eminent writers, C. S. Lewis and L. H. Myers. The former was well-known in the literary and university life of the inter-War years.