George, W L
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1882-1926) French-born author in UK from early adulthood, prolific from 1911, modestly controversial in various contexts, including Feminism; but a figure whose work (and reputation) never quite jelled. His one novel of sf interest, Children of the Morning (May-December 1926 The Fortnightly Review; 1926), retains some interest for its unmistakable prefiguring of William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), both tales in which the triumphalism of the Robinsonade – and its nineteenth-century descendants with multiple casts like The Coral Island (1858) by R M Ballantyne – is savagely undercut, partly through the device of stranding more than one solitary entrepreneur-in-the-making upon a desert Island, and partly – in this case explicitly – treating the society that survives, in a manner typical of the Scientific Romance, as an experiment in the course of Evolution. As in Lord of the Flies, the novel ends in due course with the arrival of a warship, which effects an ambiguous rescue. [JC]
Walter Lionel George
born Paris: 20 March 1882
died London: 30 January 1926
works
- Children of the Morning (London: Chapman and Hall, 1926) [first appeared May-December 1926 The Fortnightly Review: hb/Eric R Parker]
links
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