'The son of a barely literate Derbyshire collier recalled a sister, a worker in a hosiery factory, who was steeped in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats and D.H. Lawrence. Their mother's reading "would astonish the modern candidate for honours in English at any university", he claimed. "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeniev, Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Meredith, Scott, Dickens, all the classics, poetry etc., all these gave her immense joy".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sutton Print: Book
'Growing up in Lyndhurst after the First World War, R.L. Wild regularly read aloud to his marginally literate grandmother and his completely illiterate grandfather - and it was his grandparents who selected the books... "I shall never understand how this choice was made. Until I started reading to them they had no more knowledge of English literature than a Malay Aborigine... I suppose it was their very lack of knowledge that made the choice, from "Quo Vadis" at eight, Rider Haggard's "She" at nine. By the time I was twelve they had come to know, intimately, a list of authors ranging from Shakespeare to D.H. Lawrence. All was grist to the mill (including Elinor Glyn). The classics, poetry, essays, belles lettres. We took them all in MY stride. At times we stumbled on gems that guided us to further riches. I well remember the Saturday night they brought home "The Essays of Elia". For months afterwards we used it as our roadmap...".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: R.L. Wild Print: Book
[the 'intellectual' clique within the Clarion Scouts, including Edwin Muir] "followed the literary and intellectual development of the time, discovering such writers as Bergson, Sorel, Havelock Ellis, Galsworthy, Conrad, E.M. Forster, Joyce and Lawrence, the last two being contributed by me, for I had seen them mentioned in the New Age by Ezra Pound".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Book
'With autodidact diligence [Leslie Paul] closed in on the avant-garde. He read "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land", though not until the 1930s. He smuggled "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" past customs. In "John O'London's" and "The Nation", in William MacDougall's Home University Library volume on "Psychology" and F.A. Servante's "Psychology of the Boy", he read up on Freud. In a few years he knew enough to ghost-write BBC lectures on modern psychology'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Paul Print: Book
[Lehmann and her first husband, Leslie Runcimann] 'were great readers, particularly of modern novelists such as Huxley, Lawrence and Gerhardie.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamond Lehmann Print: Book
[Lehmann and her first husband, Leslie Runcimann] 'were great readers, particularly of modern novelists such as Huxley, Lawrence and Gerhardie.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Runcimann Print: Book
'The fresh-sounding work of the War generation, which began to appear in the late 1920s and early 1930s, provided him with important models. Huxley, Wells and Aldington (especially "Death of a Hero") were rapidly digested; his poetic models were Edith Sitwell, Aldington, Nichols, Sassoon and Graves (in the cheap Benn's Sixpenny Poets editions), to be followed by the more lasting influences of Eliot and D.H. Lawrence...He read an essay by Lawrence in which he showed how England treated its writers. That, he said, made him decide "to swim against the current".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
'He consumed works of western philosophy, from Rousseau to Wyndham Lewis. All this he added to his diet of sexology - Freud, Remy de Gourmont, de Sade and Krafft-Ebing. And with the Mediterranean in mind, he read D.H. Lawrence's "Sea and Sardinia" and Norman Douglas's "South Wind"'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages,meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair.
Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages,meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair.
Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'Read [italics] The Captain's Doll [end italics] [D.H. Lawrence] again (about the 8th time I think) and like it better than ever. Odd how again, though, the woman is more real than the man. The man is a mouthpiece for the right ideas but he doesn't quite [italics] exist [end italics]. Hannele exists yet the doll is oddly more alive than the Captain.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'D.H. Lawrence draws so heavily on his own life - yet how often the best and freest part of his writing is his invention - like the wife in "The Captain's Doll".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'Sutton and Larkin grew steadily closer as they moved up through the senior school. Tiring of their childish reading, they turned to weightier matters, Larkin discovering D.H. Lawrence and Sutton "retaliating with Cezanne".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin Print: Book
'Sydney [Larkin's father] gave him free run of his library and his appetite for books grew enormously. "Thanks to my father", he wrote later: "our house contained not only the principal works of most main English writers in some form or other (admittedly there were exceptions, like Dickens), but also nearly-complete collections of authors my father favoured - Hardy, Bennett, Wilde, Butler and Shaw, and later on Lawrence, Huxley and Katherine Mansfield".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sydney Larkin Print: Book
'I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers. They were imitations of anything I happened to be reading at the time: Sir Thomas Brown, de Quincey, Henry Newbolt, the Ballads, Blake, Baroness Orczy, Marlowe, Chums, the Imagists, the Bible, Poe, Keats, Lawrence, Anon., and Shakespeare. A mixed lot as you see, and randomly remembered'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Dylan Thomas Print: Book
'I have just read DH Lawrence's "Kangaroo". How I hated (in italics) it! Altho I think the Chapter about the War is well written, but it is so full of Spite, bitterness & nasty "cur" like ( in italics) snarly feeling. Odd again, for I never saw that side of him. have you read his "Letters"?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ottoline Morrell Print: Book
'On the way up I read Lady Chatterley's Lover, in the new full continental edition a friend got from Germany. I now retract what I said that DHL's letters are more important than his novel. Lady C. is a vastly important book. I understand it. I understand it as necessary. It is delicate and pure. One of the purest things I have ever read. It is far too long. But the strong necessary teaching is there. In parts its as direct and simple as the Bible. Its an amazing love-song; no not a love-song, a life-song. It has given me confidence and courage. It could purge the world.Nevertheless I feel its a thing, a teaching, I must take and pass. I could not stay just in that region. That was Lawrence. But I feel that my goal is quite different. I salute Lady Chatterley, & I will not say leave it behind, but leave it aside. As I said in my last, sex is to art what sleep is to waking life. Full spiritual wakefulness is without sex & is a new innocence, a new childishness if you like.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Walter D'Arcy Cresswell Print: Book
‘There is an excellent article in this week Saturday Westminster, a paper of
which I am very fond. It is a review by Walter de la Mare, and is that poet’s
confession of Faith … My leave starts on Thursday—5 whole days … Do you
not like Laurence Binyon’s verses in the Times Supplement? Those and
Hardy’s and Kipling’s are the best of the bunch. Though I like Watson
Grenfell and Noyes. Hardy’s grows on one. Did you ever read his last book
of Short Stories—"The Changed Man"? … Have you read any of D F
Lawrence? I have just finished an extraordinary book called "The White
Peacock", full of arresting studies of character and most essentially
breathing of earth and clouds and flowers—though not a pleasant book …
we had Zeps here about a fortnight ago. Two bombs were dropped on
Chelmsford itself, both on or near the Glosters billeting area. The damage
was perhaps 5£ worth. It cured an old lady of muscular rheumatism, indeed
it made an athlete, a sprinter of her—she went down the street in her
nightgown like a comet or some gravity-defying ghost.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ivor Bertie Gurney Print: Book
‘I am back in the Trenches now and my address is altered as you notice.
Thank you for Lawrence offer but cloth books are so bulky and impossible
out here. I have sent home the Georgian book. I know his poems a little
and admire his power, but not his outlook. I suppose he is the necessary
spokesman for people that way inclined … I read an excellent poem in the
Westminster Gazette; it got the prize there … do you know who wrote it?
Its by someone at the front.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Isaac Rosenberg Print: Book
‘I have started to read again, having read nothing all the closing months of
last year. I have discovered a man called D. H. Lawrence who knows the
way to write, and I still stick to Hardy: to whom I never managed to convert
you … We talk of going out in March. I am positively looking forward to that
event, not in the brave British drummer-boy spirit, of course, but as a relief
from this boredom … We don’t seem to be winning, do we? It looks like an
affair of years.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Hamilton Sorley Print: Book
