Abstract
D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955) is aptly the central work in Leavis’s criticism both of the novel and as a whole. It looks back to one of the earliest long essays Leavis wrote, on Lawrence, in 1930, which he then placed at the centre of For Continuity (1933); and it looks forward to his last book, Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976), in which he confirms his conviction of Lawrence’s centrality as writer and thinker. The middle work strikingly shows, too, that all Leavis’s interests and ‘fields’ as a critic—in literature, culture, society, education—have converged with the interests of the novelist who concerns himself most deeply with the modern world. ‘The novel can help us to live, as nothing else can’,1 Lawrence had claimed, and Leavis in this book endorses Lawrence. He finds Lawrence’s art overall an education in the broadest and deepest senses, both ‘enlivening’ and ‘enlightening’ (p. 9).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Harry T. Moore, D. H. Lawrence: The Man and his Works (Toronto, 1969) p. 280.
George H. Ford, Double Measure (New York, 1965) p. 5.
See After Strange Gods and Leavis’s review of it in Scrutiny, III (1934) 184–91.
Roger Poole, ‘The Affirmation Is of Life: The Later Criticism of F. R. Leavis’, Universities Quarterly, XXIX (Winter 1974) 64.
In a letter written to Mr Humphrey Milford, in 1907, declining the invitation to write a preface to Melville’s book, about to be published by the Oxford University Press; repr. in Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (eds), ‘Moby Dick’ as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts 1851–1970 (New York, 1970) pp. 122–3.
Mark Spilka, Introduction to D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963) p. 5. In light of the backstabbing in Lawrence criticism, Spilka’s summary of Leavis’s achievement is exemplary: all the more generous for his having himself been early in the field of this criticism, and all the more interesting because disinterested. One after another he makes the essential points: the title of Leavis’s book ‘seems definitive’ because Lawrence’s novels were his ‘chief métier’; his approach through the idea of ‘the novel as dramatic poem’ was apter than later ‘symbolist’ approaches, because it ‘could keep fidelity with rendered life and avoid excessive symbol-hunting’; he created ‘new hierarchies of accepted texts’; his readings illuminated ‘meaning and order where previous readers found impenetrable chaos’ and so showed an ‘integrative intelligence in Lawrence’; he corrected misconceptions about Lawrence and sex, brought out Lawrence’s ‘neglected powers of characterization’ and the ‘vitality of wit in his shorter tales’; and, not least, Leavis did not go overboard in extravagant eulogy: ‘with characteristic firmness, he has judged and discarded works which fail to meet his exacting standards’ (pp. 3–5).
This does not cancel, but rather adds interest to George H. Ford’s perceptive comment (prophetic of Leavis) that ‘such novelists as Joyce and Lawrence anticipated the counter-revolution’ in Dickens criticism, and that ‘criticism, in devising ways of coping with their narratives, has been aided in coping with those of Dickens’—Dickens and His Readers (Princeton, NJ, 1955) p. 254. For Leavis the pattern is Dickens-Lawrence-Dickens.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1988 P.J.M. Robertson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Robertson, P.J.M. (1988). F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence. In: The Leavises on Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09670-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09670-1_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-44586-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-09670-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)