So I became a school-teacher, and went down to Croydon, London, to teach boys in an elementary school, at ninety pounds a year. I hated it: I am no teacher. I wrote in the evenings, but never looked on myself as a writer. There was a burning sort of pleasure in writing: and Miriam loved everything I wrote. I never showed anything to my mother. She would have had an amused feeling about it all, and have felt sceptical. To this day, my family is annoyed that I write unpleasant books that nobody really wants to read: certainly they don’t, although they work through them, I suppose, because they still“love” me so dearly: me, the brother Bertie, not the embarrassing D. H. Lawrence.

It was Miriam who first sent poems of mine to the English Review: when I was twenty-three. It was she who got back the answer, accepting them. And she was still at home in Underwood, I was in London, far away. Ford Madox Hueffer, who had just begun to edit the English Review—and he did it so well—immediately told me I was a genius: which was a mere phrase to me. Among the working classes, geniuses don’t enter. Hueffer was very kind to me, so was Edward Garnett. They were the first literary men I ever met—and the first men really outside my own class. They were very kind, very generous. Hueffer read the Manuscript of The White Peacock. I had by now finished the novel, having struggled for five years to get it out of the utterly unformed chaos of my consciousness, having written some of it eleven times, and all of it four times. I hewed it out with infinitely more labour than my father hewed out coal. But once it was done, I knew more or less what I had to do.

Hueffer said The White Peacock had every fault that an English novel can have—“but you are a genius”. That is how they have always been with me. I have every fault that a writer can have—but I have genius. I used to say: For God’s sake, don’t insult me by calling me a genius. Now I let them talk.