John Middleton Murry - Editor

Editor

From 1911 to 1913, Murry was editor of the literary magazine Rhythm, which was later renamed The Blue Review.

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 the military, 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 that featured 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 influential periodical, The Adelphi (The New Adelphi, 1927–30), which involved associations with Jack Common and Max Plowman. It 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 the 1930s London Eliot had taken the centre of the critical stage.