PositiveThe New Criterion[Rundell] is the author of several novels for children, so she knows how to tell a story briskly and crisply (if, at times, a little too chattily) ... The textual problems created by variant readings are formidable, but here Rundell, unlike her predecessors, can profit from Robin Robbins’s authoritative two-volume edition (2008).
Frances Wilson
MixedThe New CriterionWilson pays welcome attention to Lawrence’s poems and to his essays, travel books, reviews, and polemical pamphlets ... Wilson claims that \'Lawrence structured his life . . . around Dante’s great poem in the way that James Joyce shaped Ulysses around The Odyssey.\' To which one can only say: no, he didn’t. Lawrence was too much of an improviser to structure his life around anything. It is Wilson who does the structuring ... About [Lawrence\'s sexuality], Wilson is curt ... In view of Wilson’s sympathy with the poems, it’s a pity that she passes over his magnificent last volume, with its sequence of poems about facing death, which at times rise to remarkable lyrical heights ... Wilson’s coverage of the last years of Lawrence’s life is awkwardly hurried and sketchy. Those who wish to know what happened after his death can find the details in the books by Worthen and Ellis. It might have been better if Wilson had stopped in 1925.
