Valentine Cunningham

Literary mafia boss

The editor who nurtured Conrad, Edward Thomas and Jean Rhys also stripped D.H. Lawrence of his fine provincial realism

issue 09 December 2017

Edward Garnett, radical, pacifist, freethinker, Russophile man of letters, was from the 1890s onwards for many years the pre-eminent fixer of English literature. D.H. Lawrence’s widow Frieda hailed him as ‘the midwife’ of Lawrence’s ‘genius’. And so he was; while he also nurtured Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Liam O’Flaherty, H.E.

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