Mr. Noon (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Lindeth Vasey (Editor), PeterPreston (Editor), D . H . Lawrence (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.30

  This Penguin edition is the first annotated paperback publication of Lawrence's autobiographical and strikingly innovative unfinished novel. Begun in 1920, Mr Noon is divided into two distinct parts, the first of which appeared in 1934 and the second of which remained unpublished until the Cambridge edition of 1984, the first publication of the novel in full. Abandoning a promising academic career at Cambridge, Gilbert Noon returns to Whetstone, where he becomes a teacher at the local technical school. His rootlessness leads him into an inept experiment of 'spoony' love with a fellow schoolteacher, Emmie Bostock. The ensuing scandal causes him to flee to Germany, where he finds true passion in his developing relationship with Johanna, the unhappily married wife of an English doctor.

• Used

  Paperback
  1986

  $3.30

• New

  Paperback
  1987

  $38.20

  Mr Noon is a sardonic tale about the amorous adventures of Gilbert Noon, a young schoolmaster in Lawrence's home county of Nottinghamshire who gets entangled with a girl, loses his job, and decides to leave the country to escape the narrow provincial middle-class morality. It was first known as a long story posthumously published in A Modern Lover (1934) and collected in the volume called Phoenix II (1968). Lawrence in fact wrote a long continuation of the novel, but the manuscript disappeared for many years. The Cambridge edition brought the two parts together for the first time. It is like a sequel to Sons and Lovers, but much more straightforwardly autobiographical. The publication of the complete work added a new work of major importance to the canon of a great writer, and was widely hailed as a major literary event.