John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry (6 August 1889 – 12 March 1957) was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband, for his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and for his friendship (and brief affair) with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.

John Middleton Murry was born in Peckham, London, on 6 August 1889 to John Murry (1860/1–1947), a clerk in the Inland Revenue, and Emily Wheeler (1869/70–1951). John Murry, a self-made man from an "impoverished and illiterate" background, prioritized his son's education. At the age of two, Murry was sent to the Roles Road Board School, and afterward attended the Bellendon Road Higher Grade Board School. His aunt, at the age of 11, called him a "little old man". By 1893, his parents moved from Peckham to East Dulwich, along with his mother's sister and mother, into a shared house. Beginning in 1901, Murry was educated at Christ's Hospital, where he received a scholarship. There, he and friends purchased a jellygraph machine for a newspaper he was the editor-in-chief of, and at 18 he became the editor of the school's magazine. When he was 16 and at Christ's Hospital, he was awarded the Charles Lamb medal for an essay entitled "Literature and Journalism". He also attended Brasenose College, Oxford. There he met the writer Joyce Cary, a lifelong friend.

He met Katherine Mansfield at the end of 1911, through W. L. George. His intense relationship with her, her early death, and his subsequent allusions to it shaped both his later life and the attitudes (often hostile) of others to him. Leonard Woolf in his memoirs called Murry "Pecksniffian". By 1933 his reputation "had touched bottom", and Rayner Heppenstall's short book of 1934, John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality, could note that he was "the best-hated man of letters in the country".

Murry was editor of the literary magazine Rhythm from 1911 to 1913, and then The Blue Review. In 1913 an associate, the publisher Charles Granville of Stephen Swift Ltd, was found guilty of embezzlement and bigamy, and imprisoned. Some debts had been put in Murry's name, and their finances were seriously affected for the next six years. In 1914 he met D. H. Lawrence, and became an important supporter. The next year they started a short-lived magazine together, The Signature. In 1931, after a complex evolution of the relationship, Murry wrote in Son of Woman one of the first and most influential posthumous assessments of Lawrence as a man. Medically certified as unfit for military service, with pleurisy and possible tuberculosis, during the war years he was part of the Garsington circle of Ottoline Morrell.

In 1919, Murry became the editor of The Athenaeum, recently purchased by Arthur Rowntree. Under his editorship it was a literary review featuring work by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. It lasted until 1921. It had enthusiastic support from E. M. Forster, who later wrote that "Here at last was a paper that was a pleasure to read and an honour to write for, and which linked up literature and life". Its fate was to be merged into The Nation, which became The Nation and Athenaeum, in the period 1923 to 1930 edited by H. D. Henderson. In 1923 he became the founding editor of The Adelphi (The New Adelphi, 1927–30), in association with Jack Common and Max Plowman. The magazine continued in various forms until 1948. It reflected his successive interests in Lawrence, an unorthodox Marxism, pacifism, and a return to the land. According to David Goldie, Murry and the Adelphi, and Eliot and The Criterion, were in an important rivalry by the mid-1920s, with competing definitions of literature, based respectively on romanticism allied to liberalism and a subjective approach, and a form of classicism allied to traditionalism and a religious attitude. In this contest, Goldie says, Eliot emerged a clear victor in the sense that, in London during the 1930s, Eliot had taken the centre of the critical stage.

Murry reviewed for The Westminster Gazette and then The Times Literary Supplement, from 1912. Initially he was much influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which he disavowed in 1913. He was one of an identified group of post-World War I critics that included Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Read, and Edgell Rickword. Murry gave Huxley an editorial job at The Athenaeum. Murry also helped encourage British interest in the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky: his 1916 work Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study argued Dostoyevsky was an important novelist and philosophical thinker.

Murry led the charge against Georgian poetry. A leader in the 16 May 1919 edition of The Athenaeum was an early example of a reasoned attack against the Georgian style of verse; and Murry coupled this with an adversarial attitude to The London Mercury edited by J. C. Squire. He reviewed quite harshly Siegfried Sassoon's Counter-Attack in 1918, despite having helped him in 1917 to draft an anti-war piece for H. W. Massingham's The Nation. In-house, however, he was not master enough to award an essay competition prize to the then-unknown Herbert Read, over the wishes of George Saintsbury and Robert Bridges, who preferred the poet William Orton.

F. R. Leavis admired and was influenced by Murry's early criticism; later he criticised Murry in the pages of Scrutiny, but continued to acknowledge a debt to him late in life.