J Murry
John Middleton Murry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, searchJohn Middleton Murry (6 August 1889 – 12 March 1957) was an English writer. He was prolific, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime.
A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married as her second husband, in 1918, and his friendship with D.H. Lawrence and his friendship (and brief affair) with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, he edited her work.
Early life
He was born in Peckham, London, the son of a civil servant. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Brasenose College, Oxford. There he met the writer Joyce Cary, a lifelong friend.
He met Katherine Mansfield at the end of 1911, through W. L. George. His intense relationship with her, her early death, and his subsequent allusions to it, shaped both his later life and the attitudes (often hostile) of others to him. Leonard Woolf in his memoirs called Murry "Pecksniffian". By 1933 his reputation "had touched bottom", and Rayner Heppenstall's short book of 1934, John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality , could note that he was "the best-hated man of letters in the country".
Editor
From 1911 to 1913, Murry was editor of the poetry magazine Rhythm . The Blue Review was a successor.
In 1914 he met D. H. Lawrence, and became an important supporter. The next year they started a short-lived magazine together, The Signature . In 1931, after a complex evolution of the relationship, Murry wrote in Son of Woman one of the first and most influential posthumous assessments of Lawrence as a man.
Medically certified as unfit for the military, with pleurisy and possible tuberculosis, during the war years he was part of the Garsington circle of Ottoline Morrell.
In 1919, Murry became the editor of the
Athenaeum
, recently purchased by Arthur Rowntree. Under his editorship it was a literary review that featured work by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. It lasted until 1921. It had enthusiastic support from E. M. Forster, who later wrote that "Here at last was a paper that was a pleasure to read and an honour to write for, and which linked up literature and life". Its fate was to be merged into
