by JOHN SUTHERLAND
Does a writer’s carnal experience matter? D H Lawrence, the most unzipped of British novelists, believed it did. His chauvinist sneer at Austen as a ‘narrow-gutted spinster’ indicates that some rumpy-humpy would have done wonders for her fiction.
Of Forster, Lawrence told Bertrand Russell: ‘Morgan sucks his dummy – you know, those child’s comforters – long after his age.’ He should, one deduces, have graduated to his grown-up sucking earlier, for the good of English Literature.
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via 3 Quarks Daily