Cambridge Edition: Sons and Lovers

ELT 37:3 1994 to return quickly to passages of particular interest, Samson's book brings sophistication and judgement to the least current of the three theorists. She attends to the differences between the questions Leavis sought to answer and those which more commonly compel readers a quarter century later, foregrounding the historical nature of any way of reading or interpreting. But, on the whole, the series misses an interesting opportunity to address questions that should be as crucial for professors as for students. Subsequent volumes, perhaps, will not so narrowly construe their task to be the explanation of individual theoretical brilliance. Instead, they might use the apparent need for the series itself to question the emerging mission of "cultural theory" in the Anglo-American university. Michael Coyle _________________ Colgate University Cambridge Edition: Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence. Sons and Lovers. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. lxxxi + 675pp. $95.00 IT MUST be made clear from the outset that this, like other volumes in Cambridge's Lawrence edition, is a fine piece of scholarship, and very well produced; however, none of the earlier published texts made such a splash in the international popular media. No one reading this review will be unaware that material cancelled from the final manuscript of the novel on the authority of the publisher Duckworth's reader and editor Edward Garnett has been reinstated for the first time in the Cambridge version. Though the edition has many features of interest, issues raised by the editors' decision to return to Lawrence's manuscript and by their justification of the decision demand particular attention. In the general editors' preface which appears in every volume, there is this statement of intent: The Cambridge edition aims to provide texts which are as close as can now be determined to those [Lawrence] would have wished to see printed." One might say that every decision made in Sons and Lovers flows from this over-concise proposition, which as it stands implies that desire is an enduring and unfluctuating condition, and furthermore assumes that long-dead wishes can with plausibility be exhumed intact. Very briefly the case is this: Garnett read Lawrence's third version of the novel after it had been rejected by Heinemann, and at Lawrence's 414 BOOK REVIEWS request made (in something like ten days) a series of critical notes about it. Lawrence called the notes "awfully nice" and on their receipt began his fourth and last reworking of the novel. Garnett then read the completed manuscript for Duckworth and demanded deletions, to which Lawrence, by now extremely anxious to see the novel published, sadly agreed. When he got proofs and saw what Garnett had done (amounting to the removal of around ten percent) he twice thanked the editor for his work: "You did the pruning job jolly well, and I am grateful." The introduction to the edition assesses the motivation for and the effect of Garnett's intervention: he was uncomfortable with the narrative's apparent lack of Jamesian unity, and was probably for economic reasons under pressure from Duckworth the publisher to reduce the length of the piece; he (or the publisher) also thought that some details were sexually too frank for publication. Some further small alterations were made by Garnett on the galley proofs before Lawrence saw them, and yet more, apparently at Duckworth's insistence, before page-proofs were sent to Lawrence. The rationale for the editors' decisions regarding this sequence of events is set out on two and a half pages at the end of the sixty-page introduction. It begins: The first decision an editor has to make is whether in principle to publish the whole text of Lawrence's final MS or Garnett's edited version of it. The sole basis for making this decision is to answer the irreducibly hypothetical question: which text would Lawrence prefer to have published had he the choice?" And here the arguments begin. Most radically it might be argued that the choice of text in a critical edition of this sort is a minor concern, so long as the text generated is accurate and the apparatus surrounding it...