He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy.

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895. From this letter arose the correspondence and friendship between these two men. Lawrence’s long letter to Edward Garnett (who forwarded it to Williamson), in which he gives a detailed – and entertaining – criticism of 'Tarka the Otter', then about to be published. The final piece is not by Williamson but is of particular interest, being the text of T.

Yeates’s 'Winged Victory' James Farrar’s 'The Unreturning Spring' Walter Robson’s 'Letters from a Soldier' and the 1973 reprint of 'The Wipers Times').Īlso included are Williamson’s illuminating forewords to his own books 'The Pathway' and 'The Labouring Life', which were only printed in the scarce limited editions. Manhood’s 'Little Peter the Great' Izaak Walton’s 'The Compleat Angler' V. Hudson ‘In Darkest England’, the presidential address that Williamson gave to the Francis Thompson Society in 1967, in which he describes his discovery of Thompson’s poetry in the crater-zones of the Western Front three short pieces on Richard Aldington, Roy Campbell and Arthur Machen and a collection of Williamson’s prefaces and introductions to books of authors whom he admired (Douglas Bell’s 'A Soldier’s Diary of the Great War' John Heygate’s 'Decent Fellows' H. Other contents are: ‘Some Nature Writers and Civilization’, the prestigious Wedmore Lecture that Williamson gave to the Royal Society of Literature in 1959, considering the authors Richard Jefferies and W. He wanted to restate this before the publication of Aldington’s book, and hence this essay, which begins with an account of his visit in 1949, with Christine, his second wife, to Aldington in France.

Williamson, on the contrary, through Lawrence’s books, letters and two personal meetings with him, held him in the highest regard. Richard Aldington had let Williamson know by his letters that after years of research and reflection, he had come to regard Lawrence as a deeply flawed and mendacious character, very different from the popular conception of the heroic ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. However the beginning and the ending are different, relating to the circumstances of 1954 when the essay appeared in 'The European', the distinguished periodical. Lawrence’, is in its middle section a revised version of much of 'Genius of Friendship' (1941). This is a collection of important essays by Henry Williamson on books and writers, first published in 1994, and now expanded.

Animal Saga by Henry Williamson