Abstract:
The Island Lover: Lawrence Durrell’s “The Magnetic Island”
by
Shelley Cox
“The Magnetic Island” is a recently rediscovered prose fragment by
Lawrence Durrell, written sometime before 1939, with three illustrations
by Nancy Durrell. Durrell gave the 100-page typescript to the British
poet and editor, Anne Ridler, in the 1940s, and its existence had been
unknown to Durrell scholars until its purchase by Special Collections,
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Very unlike other Durrell
works, the story takes place on an unnamed Greek island in the 6th century
BC, with the encounter of a Greek innocent and a group of courtiers, philosophers,
and scholars living there in isolation. Whether the text is complete
in itself, or an abandoned fragment of a larger project is unknown, although
there is a conclusion of the action. Obviously influenced by the
Laputa section of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the work also has
characters and imagery very similar to those found in Durrell’s poetry
of this period, and to unpublished material found in his notebooks from
1935-1939. It may also be a possible ancestor of his play, Sappho,
written in the late 1940s.
Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000): 45-57.
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