Cambridge's Lady Chatterley

ELT 38:3 1995 house. It is then that he flees to Devon in search of peace and a more healthy climate. The work Gissing publishes during the period covered in this volume —2 July 1895 to 27 November 1897—includes short stories, two novellas, and one novel. He writes now mostly about the middle class, not the life of the very poor depicted with such detail in his earlier work. He does not think much of his short stories—"small literary trash"—and he judges the novella Sleeping Fires "poor stuff," though better than its counterpart, The Paying Guest. But in The Whirlpool, published in April, 1897, he sees "more solid matter" than in most of his previous novels. He is thinking of the book's bitter indictments of modern middle-class family life; of the greed animating the "money-getters," who include imperialists; and of the "pleasure-seekers" inhabiting the new suburbs. Bertz aptly observes that The Whirlpool contributes to the psychology of "this our age of transition." The most arresting passage in these letters is Gissing's account of how he came to the crucial decision that ended his seven-year marriage. During a sleepless night towards the end of a month-long family holiday in the Yorkshire dales in August of 1897, Gissing, like Aeneas, is vouchsafed a prophetic injunction: "the thought flashed upon me—4My boy, your path lies to the shores of the Mediterranean. Go, in the name of all that is sensible & hopeful, & work there till next spring.' And I shall go." A new warning from his doctor about the danger of the English climate to his lungs reinforces Gissing's resolve, and he arranges with Eliza Orme, a social investigator who has befriended Edith, to establish her and the baby in London rooms. He then proceeds to Siena, where he completes a commissioned book on Dickens, and in November he moves on to Rome and then Naples before embarking on the tour of southern Italy that will produce By the Ionian Sea. Shortly after his fortieth birthday, he writes from Cotrone of his "good health & spirits." With Gissing temporarily in this sanguine mood, the editors end the volume. Martha S. Vogeler California State University, Fullerton Cambridge's Lady Chatterley D. H. Lawrence. Lady Chatterley's Lover. Michael Squires, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ix + 462 pp. $95.00 BYNOW the general editorial policy of the Cambridge Lawrence 366 BOOK REVIEWS edition is well understood by anyone who is particularly interested in the author or in textual studies. It is conservative, eclectic, and claims to produce the only truly authoritative version of Lawrence's work now available, a claim which is sustainable within the framework of the edition's ideology. It is possible, accepting the edition's premises, to argue with individual decisions, but by and large the editing has been done accurately and intelligently. Squires's edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover offers no real surprises, particularly not to anyone familiar with his earlier The Creation of Lady Chatterley's Lover (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Lawrence was a rewriter rather than a reviewer, and the Lady Chatterley manuscript survives in three successive versions, and a typescript of the final version, so there is plenty of material for the critic who is interested in Lawrence's creative process at this late stage of his life. However, variants between the three manuscript versions are not recorded in the edition; this is sad but hardly unexpected, since the differences are so substantial that a very massive and complex apparatus would have had to be developed, and a print edition is not particularly well suited to handle such material—though, on the other hand (at least in theory), an electronic edition of Lady Chatterley would be spacious and flexible enough to offer convenient comparative access to all the manuscript material and the surviving typescript. The final manuscript was used as the basis for the rather complex three-copy typescript, one copy of which (though not the surviving copy, which was expurgated by Lawrence for the American publisher Knopf) was used as setting-copy for the first edition of the novel, printed in Florence and...