The very first copy of The White Peacock that was ever sent out, I put into my mother’s hands, when she was dying. She looked at the outside, and then at the title-page, and then at me, with darkening eyes. And though she loved me so much, I think she doubted whether it could be much of a book, since no one more important than I had written it. Somewhere, in the helpless privacies of her being, she had wistful respect for me. But for me in the face of the world, not much… Anyway, she was beyond reading my first immortal work. It was put aside, and I never wanted to see it again. She never saw it again.
After the funeral, my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been [in] Hottentot.
‘And what dun they gie thee for that, lad?’
‘Fifty pounds, father.’
‘Fifty pounds!’ He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. ‘Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.’
--D. H. Lawrence
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