The Scarlet Letter. London: J. M. Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1916.

[D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)] – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
The Scarlet Letter. London: J. M. Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1916.
Octavo (173 x 110mm). Original red cloth, spine gilt (slightly faded, some splitting to textblock). Provenance: D. H. Lawrence (ownership inscription on endpaper, ‘D.H. Lawrence, Zennor, St. Ives, C[orn]w[all], Jan. 1917’, and numerous notes in pencil including annotations in the margins of pages 187, 209, and 242 and 2pp. of notes across the rear endpapers, the printed text on the rear endpaper overwritten in pencil and the printed female figure on rear pastedown overdrawn in pencil and transformed into a Christ-like figure) – Sotheby’s, 22-23 July 1985, lot 272.

‘The book is the pure spiritual statement of the history & condition of the American soul’: D. H. Lawrence's copy of a masterpiece of American literature, annotated in pencil with around 300 words of insightful criticism and augmented by a pencil sketch of a Christ-like figure on the rear pastedown.

This copy of The Scarlet Letter was sent by Robert Mountsier (1888-1972), a journalist and subsequently Lawrence’s literary agent in the USA, as part of a group of American literature requested by the author in a letter of 4 January 1917. The group – which also included Melville’s Moby Dick, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination – represented ‘the clearest indication so far that [Lawrence] had conceived the project which eventually led to Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923)’ (Boulton & Robertson, Letters, vol. III). Studies has been widely celebrated as a classic of the genre, and lauded by literary critics including Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode, who described it as ‘one of the greatest and most original achievements of 20th-century criticism’ (London Review of Books, 7 February 1985). See lot 123 for the original manuscripts for the work.