This book is centred on the relationship between the personal lives of writers and the works they produce. It develops a portrait of a circle of writers—John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence—who significantly influenced the development of modernism in Britain. It investigates a complex intertextuality amongst the three writers and also explores their connections with other modernist figures, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mark Gertler and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The book argues that Murry should be re-evaluated within the contexts of recent ... More

This book is centred on the relationship between the personal lives of writers and the works they produce. It develops a portrait of a circle of writers—John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence—who significantly influenced the development of modernism in Britain. It investigates a complex intertextuality amongst the three writers and also explores their connections with other modernist figures, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mark Gertler and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The book argues that Murry should be re-evaluated within the contexts of recent developments in modernist studies and contemporary theories of intertextuality. It considers Murry's role as a ‘circulator’ of ideas and reputations in his work as critic, editor, and novelist, and shows how his own reputation was shaped by his emotionally-charged relationships with friends, lovers, and colleagues. This focus on personal relationships leads to discussion of several theoretical issues: 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. By making use of Murry's unpublished journals and letters to complicate the arguments of earlier biographers and critics about his personal and professional relationships with Mansfield and Lawrence, and through intertextual readings of their fiction and his own novels and essays, the book contributes not only to Mansfield and Lawrence studies, but to current scholarly debates about the genealogy of modernism, the influence of literary coteries, and the marketing of modernism.