David Lindsay - Novelist
(1876-1945)
David Lindsay was born in Blackheath, London, on 3rd March 1876, and brought up there, though he spent holidays with his father's relations near
Jedburgh. Since his father deserted the family at an early stage, financial difficulties prevented Lindsay from going on to university.
Instead, in 1894, he began work in an insurance office, remaining in this job for over twenty years.
He married in 1916 and moved from London to the country, where his wife encouraged him to become a full-time writer.
Lindsay's first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, was published in 1920, but sold fewer than 600 copies.
A surrealist fantasy drawing to some extent on the work of George MacDonald, it has always been known as a complex and difficult book, though a recent critic maintains that a reader who approaches it with sympathy "will find the experience both profound and astonishing".
The critic quoted above, J.B. Pick, suggests elsewhere that the reader should not so much search for the meaning of the book as "hear the
drumbeats".
A Voyage to Arcturus, though unsuccessful during Lindsay's lifetime, is now
recognized as an important work both in Scottish literature and in the fantasy genre.
Acknowledged by CS Lewis as a major influence on his own fantasy novels, it has recently been reprinted in the Canongate classics series.
Canongate has also republished Lindsay's second novel, The Haunted woman (1922), also a fantasy but with a terrestrial setting, which has been described as better written, though slighter, than A Voyage to
Arcturus.
Before his death in Hove on 16th July 1945 Lindsay published three further novels, leaving two more, The Violet
Apple and The Witch, in manuscript form. These were posthumously published in 1976.
His work is now attracting considerable critical attention, for instance in JB Pick's The Great shadow house (1993) and Colin Manlove's Scottish fantasy literature (1994), both of which deal with A Voyage to Arcturus at some length, and in Bernard Sellin's The Life and works of David Lindsay (1981).
[Taken from the book Discovering Scottish writers, published by the Scottish Library Association.]
*************************************
Anyone having more information on the life and genealogy of
novelist David Lindsay and wishing to share that knowledge with the global Lindsay
community, send me an E-Mail
Page Initially Posted: November 28, 2001,
Updated: January 3, 2002
|
David Lindsay