Information
When the critic John Middleton Murry accepted D.H.Lawrence’s invitation to visit him and Frieda Weekley at Kingsgate in July 1913, he had not long graduated from Oxford and was just beginning a literary career which would lead to the editorship of two influential journals, ‘The Athenaeum’ and ‘The Adelphi’, and therefore his position at the heart of the new wave of post-war literature. He is also remembered for his studies of writers like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. He had also only recently begun a relationship with the writer Katherine Mansfield, whom he later married. When they failed to respond to Lawrence’s first invitation, probably due to lack of money for their train fare, he sent them a letter, berating them for not asking him for the money and painting an enticing picture of the joys of the seaside. They eventually came down on 26th July on what was obviously a very successful visit.
Quotations
So this time we went and we bathed all together. Once in the early evening, in the faintly chill dusk, Lawrence darting, like a schoolboy, in and out of the waves as they slipped up the flat broken sand. Katherine Mansfield was a superb swimmer, I a good one. It is the only thing I could even do better than Lawrence did it. There, on the deserted sand, the four of us bathed naked in the half-light, first happy, then shivering. Then we went back and ate a huge supper of fried steak and tomatoes. For some reason those tomatoes gleam very red in my memory.
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| Kingsgate | When the critic John Middleton Murry accepted D... |
