On Lawrence's side too, this was a remarkable friendship. Taken as a whole, the correspondence adds up to almost twice the total length of his letters to any other recipient. On their own, regardless of the other volumes in our T.E. Lawrence Letters series, the
volumes of correspondence with the Shaws will be, by far, the largest Lawrence letters project since David Garnett’s 900-page Letters of T. E. Lawrence.
Bernard Shaw gave Garnett free use of the letters he had received from Lawrence, but Charlotte refused to co-operate. The result, as we now know, was a glaring omission from the 1938 Letters, repaired to some extent in the selection edited more recently by Malcolm Brown. No general collection, however, could use more than a small fraction of the Lawrence-Shaw correspondence.
Lawrence first met the Shaws by accident, in March 1922. Five months later he wrote, very diffidently, asking whether Bernard Shaw would be willing to criticise the 1922 text of Seven Pillars. Shaw agreed, and Lawrence sent a copy. However, the first to read it, and with great enthusiasm, was Charlotte.
She was a wealthy woman in her own right, and her interest in Lawrence and his work soon led to a thriving correspondence. She offered to proof-read the subscription edition of Seven Pillars that he was preparing, and began to send parcels of books, gramophone records, and other gifts. Over the years, Lawrence gave her presents in return, including several valuable manuscripts of his writings.
Lawrence's correspondence with the Shaws between 1922 and 1935 is, without question, the most significant series of his post-war letters to survive. It covers an extraordinary variety of topics and, for much of the time, the letters were so frequent that they provide something akin to a diary of his activities. They were used extensively as source material for
the authorised biography.
The letters to Charlotte are accompanied by the few but important letters from her to Lawrence that he kept, and also by his correspondence with Bernard Shaw and other collateral material.
While editing the correspondence, Jeremy
and Nicole Wilson have had the advantage of reference to the chronological research files assembled during
work on the authorised biography. These have helped to provide
material for full and informative notes.
The first of the
Lawrence–Shaw volumes starts when Lawrence met the Shaws in 1922 and ends in December 1926. One of its principal themes is the revision and production of the subscribers' Seven Pillars. The second volume
covers the first of Lawrence's two years in India, during which he sent long letters to Charlotte almost weekly, providing the fullest account that we have of
this period that was a turning-point in his life. The third volume will
cover the second year in India. The letters from 1929-25 will be
in a fourth volume.
We do not foresee a trade edition of the complete Lawrence-Shaw Letters, though we have been asked to consider publishing a selection of about a third of the correspondence in a popular edition, at some future date.
