© Columbia University Press
Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence
Paper, 288 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-6486-3
$32.50
December, 2010
Cloth, 288 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4148-2
Edinburgh University Press
$105.00
Sydney Janet Kaplan builds a literary biography around the personal lives of John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence, three writers who significantly shaped British modernism.
She recounts their relationship with other prominent modernists, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mark Gertler, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Making use of Murry's unpublished journals and letters to Mansfield and Lawrence, and investigating their complex intertextuality, Kaplan adds compelling new layers to contemporary debates over the true genealogy of modernism, particularly the influence of literary coteries and savvy marketing strategies. She argues that we should reconsider Murry, once known as "the best-hated man of letters," as a skilled "circulator" of ideas and reputations, and by approaching this history through the prism of intimate acquaintance, Kaplan prompts renewed discussion of topics as essential and varied the concept of genius, the question of the personal in an era of impersonality, the influence of psychoanalysis, and the rationale of twentieth-century confessionalism.