Summary
Barring some youthful poems, D. H. Lawrence had just twenty years of writing life. Throughout these years—which included and were in a special way harried by the incidence of the War—he was severely encumbered by circumstances. He had to reckon with poverty, with illness, with the misapprehension of friends and the malice of strangers. None the less we find that, besides wresting from the most unpromising elements a life that was rich and adventurous, he was a prolific writer. Indeed, if we allow for the various nature of his output and take for comparison the twenty most productive years of any other accepted author, he would appear to have been the most prolific writer our country has had since Sir Walter Scott. In addition to a dozen full-length novels he wrote short stories, essays, translations, pamphlets, books of travel and of philosophy, plays and many poems. Over the same period his correspondence, whether measured by interest or by bulk, bids fair to rival the correspondence of our most communicative English men of letters. Readers will be able to judge of this for themselves to a reasonable extent in the coming autumn, when Messrs. Heinemann will publish a selection of the letters, edited by Mr. Aldous Huxley and running to some eight hundred pages. As time goes on—though of necessity not for some years—we shall see in print the remaining letters that have survived, and which, by all accounts, will engage several more stout volumes.
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- The Savage PilgrimageA Narrative of D. H. Lawrence, pp. xxxvii - xlivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981