John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry (6 August 1889 – 12 March 1957) was an English writer. He was prolific, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband, for his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and for his friendship (and brief affair) with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.

John Middleton Murry was born in Peckham, London, the son of a civil servant. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Brasenose College, Oxford. There he met the writer Joyce Cary, a lifelong friend.

He met Katherine Mansfield at the end of 1911, through W. L. George. His intense relationship with her, her early death, and his subsequent allusions to it, shaped both his later life and the attitudes (often hostile) of others to him. Leonard Woolf in his memoirs called Murry "Pecksniffian". By 1933 his reputation "had touched bottom", and Rayner Heppenstall's short book of 1934, John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality, could note that he was "the best-hated man of letters in the country".

From 1911 to 1913, Murry was editor of the literary magazine Rhythm, which was later renamed The Blue Review. In 1913 an associate, the publisher Charles Granville of Stephen Swift Ltd, was found guilty of embezzlement and bigamy and imprisoned. As some debts had been put in Murry’s name their finances were seriously affected for the next six years. In 1914 he met D. H. Lawrence, and became an important supporter. The next year they started a short-lived magazine together, The Signature. In 1931, after a complex evolution of the relationship, Murry wrote in Son of Woman one of the first and most influential posthumous assessments of Lawrence as a man. Medically certified as unfit for military service, with pleurisy and possible tuberculosis, during the war years he was part of the Garsington circle of Ottoline Morrell.

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