He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime.

[7] By 1933 his reputation "had touched bottom", and Rayner Heppenstall's short book of 1934, John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality, could note that he was "the best-hated man of letters in the country".

[12] In 1931, after a complex evolution of the relationship, Murry wrote in Son of Woman one of the first and most influential posthumous assessments of Lawrence as a man.

[13] Medically certified as unfit for military service, with pleurisy and possible tuberculosis,[14] during the war years he was part of the Garsington circle of Ottoline Morrell.

[15] Under his editorship it was a literary review featuring work by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group.

It had enthusiastic support from E. M. Forster,[16] who later wrote that "Here at last was a paper that was a pleasure to read and an honour to write for, and which linked up literature and life".

[24] He was one of an identified group of post-World War I critics that included Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Read, and Edgell Rickword.

[29] In-house, however, he was not master enough to award an essay competition prize to the then-unknown Herbert Read, over the wishes of George Saintsbury and Robert Bridges, who preferred the poet William Orton.

Murry gave his philosophy its fullest expression in his writings on Keats and Shakespeare and in an ambitiously titled volume, God: An Introduction to the Science of Metabiology.

There, picking up certain concepts from his acquaintance George Santayana, Murry describes the project of Romanticism as one of inner exploration: The upshot of this discovery results in the highest degree of ethical awareness, "an immediate knowledge of what I am and may not do.

Murry vividly narrates this exploration as a spiritual conversion (in his 1929 book GOD) —what he describes as a "desolation" followed by "illumination"—after the death of Katherine Mansfield (who had moved to G. I. Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where she died).

[36] The Adelphi was closely aligned with the Independent Labour Party;[37] Jack Common worked for it as circulation promoter and assistant editor[38] in the 1930s.

Other speakers were Steve Shaw, Herbert Read, Grace Rogers, J. Hampden Jackson, N. A. Holdaway (a Marxist theorist and schoolmaster, and a director of the centre), Geoffrey Sainsbury, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Polanyi, John Strachey, Plowman and Common.

[43] By 1937 the commune had collapsed, and the house, 'The Oaks', was turned over to some 60 Basque refugee children under the auspices of the Peace Pledge Union; they remained until 1939.

The commune had mixed fortunes and it gradually reverted to a more conventional arrangement with Murry running the farm as a commercial enterprise.

He angered many left-wingers (including George Orwell and Vera Brittain) by arguing that Nazi Germany should be allowed to retain control of mainland Europe.

He had in fact considered ordination as an Anglican priest, but gave up on it after a diagnosis in 1938 of Buerger's disease, coupled with doubts about his marriages (his third was then breaking up messily).

[54] His views converged with those of Eliot: he supported a type of elitism foreshadowed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's clerisy, and argued for by Matthew Arnold.

[55][56] In Christianity and Culture, Eliot partially supported Murry's reasoning from The Price of Leadership (1939), though stopping short of the endorsement of Arnold.

In the 2008 Hampstead Theatre production Murry was played by Nick Caldecott with Ed Stoppard as Lawrence and Charlotte Emmerson as Mansfield.