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ELT: Volume 34:4, 1991 Lawrence Down Under D. H. Lawrence and Mollie Skinner. The Boy in the Bush. Paul Eggert, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. lvii + 498 pp. $65.00 THE APPEARANCE of The Boy in the Bush marks another step toward the completion of the Cambridge University Press effort to produce standard editions of arguably the most important English writer of our century—D. H. Lawrence. This effort has already made available Lawrence's letters in seven volumes, his masterpieces—The Rainbow and Women in Love—and the "new" novel Mr. Noon published in its complete form for the first time in 1985. These hefty, and pricey, volumes have been consistently well edited by recognized Lawrence scholars. The Boy in the Bush is no exception. Paul Eggert comes to his task of editing The Boy in the Bush well qualified as a Lawrence scholar. As in other Cambridge editions, the text offers an extensive and useful scholarly introduction, beginning with a description of how The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence's "other" Australian novel {Kangaroo would precede it in 1923), came to be written. In May 1922 Lawrence visited Western Australia on what would eventually become a journey around the world. On his way to Ceylon, he met a group of Australians, especially Annie Louisa Jenkins, who encouraged him to visit their country. Jenkins found living quarters for the Lawrences at a guesthouse for convalescents, and there he met Mollie Skinner, a nurse who had published an unsuccessful novel called Letters of a V.A.D. (1918) whose setting had been shifted from South Asia to the Western Front. Lawrence encouraged her to write about her own country, especially the daunting stretches of the Australian bush. The result was "The House of Ellis," the manuscript which Skinner sent to Lawrence in the summer of 1923. It arrived in New York a day before he was to travel to the West Coast, alone, and Frieda was to sail to England to begin a kind of trial separation. Those circumstances begin to answer some of the questions the scholar as well as the common reader might have of this late novel. First, what motivated Lawrence to expend his energies in initially editing and eventually rewriting the novel? How much of this text can legitimately be called Lawrence's? And what does Lawrence's role in producing this 496 Book Reviews novel suggest about his methods of composition and the role of women in his creativity? In answer to the first question, Eggert establishes Lawrence's interest in the character of Jack Grant, based on Mollie's brother, John Russell ("Jack") Skinner (1881-1925). Like Lawrence, the "boy in the bush" left England for good to find a new world in Australia, as Lawrence was to in the Western Hemisphere. In the novel's last chapters , where Lawrence's imprint is unmistakable, Jack Grant becomes a variety of Old Testament Abraham, whose wealth and "wives" seem to reflect his Lord's favor. As Eggert suggests, the Jack Grant who is Mollie's transformed "boy" fits well into Lawrence's aspirations at the time, especially the attempt to recuperate a notion of community based on the charisma of a vital, ruggedly independent leader who solicits the loyalty of his subjects. Eggert reminds us that during this period Lawrence had just been to Mexico, the setting of The Plumed Serpent (1926), and he was revising Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), which is largely a record of his response to American culture. From the latter, Eggert cites: "Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose." Answering the second question is more problematic. Eggert claims that despite the clear evidence of Lawrence's hand, especially in the last chapter, the basic story as well as all the "historical, botanical, legal and geographic information" could only be Skinner's. The evidence of Lawrence's transformation of the "boy" into a strong leader is problematic too, since apparently Mollie's brother was also so radically changed by his experience in the bush that his friends and family scarcely recognized him when he...

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