The White Peacock

Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock was begun in 1906, rewritten three times, and published in 1911. The Cambridge edition uses the final manuscript as base-text, and faithfully recovers Lawrence's words and punctuation from the layers of publishers' house-styling and their errors; original passages, changed for censorship reasons, are reinstated. Andrew Robertson's introduction sets out the history of Lawrence's writing and revision, and the generally favourable reception by friends and reviewers. Lawrence incorporated much of his own experience and reading on to the novel which is set just north-east of Eastwood, and modelled characters on his friends and family. The notes identify real-life places and people, explain dialect forms, literary allusions, and historical references, and include sensitive passages deleted before publication. The textual apparatus records all the variant readings and the appendix prints the two surviving fragments from the earliest manuscripts of the novel, then entitled 'Laetitia'. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.