The Boy in the Bush

This is the first critical edition of The Boy in the Bush, a novel whose unlikely genesis has been surrounded in mystery and the subject of claim and counter-claim. A systematic study of all the extant textual documents has revealed a process of composition and revision which qualifies the novel to be treated unequivocally as part of the Lawrence canon. At Lawrence's suggestion an Australian nurse and part-time author, Mollie Skinner (whom he had met in 1922), wrote a tale set in late nineteenth-century Western Australia about a newly-arrived young Englishman's reactions to Perth and the outback. Lawrence's complete rewriting converted her production into an ambitious, powerful novel. The reading text here established eliminates all such instances of censorship and strips away the thousands of regularisings and miscopyings introduced by typists and typesetters. Based on Lawrence's autograph manuscript the text meticulously incorporates his subsequent revisions in the typescripts and proofs.