Scottish Authors > David Lindsay Novelist 1876-1945

David Lindsay was born in Blackheath, London, on 3rd March 1876, and brought up there, though he spent holidays with his father's relations near Jedburgh. Since his father deserted the family at an early stage, financial difficulties prevented Lindsay from going on to university. Instead, in 1894, he began work in an insurance office, remaining in this job for over twenty years. He married in 1916 and moved from London to the country, where his wife encouraged him to become a full-time writer.

Lindsay's first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, was published in 1920, but sold fewer than 600 copies. A surrealist fantasy drawing to some extent on the work of George MacDonald, it has always been known as a complex and difficult book, though a recent critic maintains that a reader who approaches it with sympathy "will find the experience both profound and astonishing". The central character, Maskull, travels to the planet of Tormance, a satellite of Arcturus. The planet is controlled by the evil Crystalman, but alongside this world exists another one, Muspel, and "Crystalman's empire is but a shadow on the face of Muspel". Maskull's adventures begin as a quest for Surtur, whose drums he has heard on Earth. (The critic quoted above, JB Pick, suggests elsewhere that the reader should not so much search for the meaning of the book as "hear the drumbeats"):

He heard what sounded like the beating of a drum on the narrow strip of shore below. It was very faint but quite distinct ... He now continued to hear the noise all the time he was lying there. The beats were in no way drowned by the far louder sound of the surf, but seemed somehow to belong to a different world.

A Voyage to Arcturus, though unsuccessful during Lindsay's lifetime, is now recognised as an important work both in Scottish literature and in the fantasy genre. Acknowledged by CS Lewis as a major influence on his own fantasy novels, it has recently been reprinted in the Canongate classics series. Canongate has also republished Lindsay's second novel, The Haunted woman (1922), also a fantasy but with a terrestrial setting, which has been described as better written, though slighter, than A Voyage to Arcturus.

Before his death in Hove on 16th July 1945 Lindsay published three further novels, leaving two more, The Violet apple and The Witch, in manuscript form. These were posthumously published in 1976. His work is now attracting considerable critical attention, for instance in JB Pick's The Great shadow house (1993) and Colin Manlove's Scottish fantasy literature (1994), both of which deal with A Voyage to Arcturus at some length, and in Bernard Sellin's The Life and works of David Lindsay (1981).

Moira Burgess

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