A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence: ‘The Betrayal’ G. H. Neville

George Henry Neville was D. H. Lawrence’s closest childhood friend. The relationship between them was one of those deep male-male bonds that Lawrence always felt the need of, and someone like Neville recurs frequently in the fiction. Reading Middleton Murry’s life of Lawrence, Son of Woman, in the 1930s, Neville saw it as the ‘Betrayal’ of his title, and set out to tell the story from his own point of view. Murry saw Lawrence’s relationship with his mother as crucial; but Neville saw the other aspects at first hand. Above all, he stressed his own part in the story, as one of those who loved Lawrence and was loved by him, and says a great deal about Lawrence’s early determination to make the sexual relationship the theme of his writing. Dr Carl Baron’s additions meanwhile help place Neville’s account as one of the most important first-hand sidelights on the story given artistic form in Sons and Lovers.