Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism

This is a collection of essays and lectures from one of England's most stimulating literary critics. John Middleton Murry wrote criticism as an act of discovery rather than judgment, believing that honest criticism reveals as much about the critic's soul as about the books examined. These essays traverse the landscape of English literature with an explorer's enthusiasm, pausing to reconsider canonical figures and uncover unexpected connections. Murry's approach is explicitly personal. He subscribes to Anatole France's famous formulation that criticism is the adventures of a man's soul among books, and his essays bear this out. They are voyages of intellectual discovery, full of surprise and genuine wonder. This collection captures what Murry calls the curious elation that criticism sometimes brings - that electric moment when a reader encounters a truth about literature that reshapes everything they thought they knew. For readers who believe great criticism is its own art form, these essays offer a model of engaged, passionate, deeply personal literary thinking.