Lavengro

A new scholarly edition of a bold yet overlooked Victorian text that blends the genres of memoir, travelogue, ethnography and the realist novel

• Permits students and academic researchers to access more subtle assessments of Lavengro, as well as a range of relevant contexts
• Reappraises the relation of Lavengro to nineteenth-century writings on Romani and traveller culture
• Explores George Borrow’s influence on an array of later Victorian and modernist authors such as Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf.
• Surveys and gauges recent debates and critical accounts of George Borrow’s life and literary career

This critical edition of George Borrow’s Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest (1851) brings a renewed focus on a formally inventive and original text for scholars of the nineteenth-century autobiographical novel and travelogue. This edition reflects and develops research that anchors Borrow’s energetically eccentric vision in a range of notable contexts. The scholarly introduction gives readers unfamiliar with the formidably prolific Borrow an opportunity to discover more about this author’s career at home and abroad (as a translator for the British and Foreign Bible Society), his stylistic innovations, and how Lavengro evokes a ‘wild England’ that became crucial for admirers in the next century such as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf.