?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 700 - $ 1,000
STILL BITTER ABOUT "THE RAINBOW": "I AM GLAD THERE IS NO MORE METHUEN" LAWRENCE, D.H. Autograph Letter Signed, to his agent James Brand Pinker, in pencil, sending a manuscript of "The Miracle" [not present; published as "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" in the April 1922 issue of English Review], expressing gladness at not having to deal with publisher Methuen & Co., speculating about the prospects of his novel [Women in Love, (1920)] and some poems, complaining of his inadequate payment by publisher Mitchell Kennerly for his novel Sons and Lovers [1913] and other works, and anticipating better success in the American market. 1 1/2 pages, 4to, onion skin paper, written on two sheets; small bust portrait mounted along its upper edge to second page just below signature, some brittling and chipping to edges with minor loss at upper corners, folds. St. Ives, "Friday" [12 January 1917]
"I send you the MS of another story--'The Miracle', which is beautiful and ends happily, so the swine of people ought to be very thankful for it. "I am glad there is no more Methuen. You will do as you think best about the novel. I don't suppose anybody will be dying to publish it, though it is a chef d'oeuvre. Perhaps the faithful Duckworth will rise up & be noble: though I very much doubt his paying. . . . "I shall be rather glad if nobody wants those little poems. Then I shall put them in the fire. "It would be a good thing if Mitchell Kennerley sold all the rights to my things. He has swindled me unscrupulously. For everything of mine he has ever done, he has paid me only £10 . . . . I am sure the American rights of Sons & Lovers are worth more than £10 . . . . "I am determined that I will have some money before long. I am sick of poking about in a corner, up to the neck in poverty. It is enough. I think America is my untilled field." Published in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, eds. Boulton and Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3, #1354. In 1915, soon after Methuen & Co. published Lawrence's The Rainbow, reviews criticized the novel's sexual content, and a court, finding the book obscene, ordered all copies destroyed. Methuen & Co. complied without offering any defense. Women in Love, Lawrence's sequel to The Rainbow, was published five years later--in America.
