Biography
Lindsay was born into a middle-class Scottish Calvinist family who had moved to London, although growing up he spent much time in Jedburgh, whence his family originally came. Although he won a scholarship to university, he was forced by poverty to go into business, and he became an insurance clerk at Lloyd's of London. He was very successful, but his career was interrupted by service in the First World War, at the age of forty. He first joined the Grenadier Guards, then the Royal Army Pay Corps, where he was promoted to Corporal.
After the war he moved to Cornwall with his young wife to become a full-time writer. A Voyage to Arcturus was published in 1920, but it was not a success, selling fewer than six hundred copies. This work was not obviously influenced by anybody, but further reading shows links with other Scottish fantasists (for example, George MacDonald, whose work Lindsay was familiar with), and it was in its turn a central influence on C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. Also, J. R. R. Tolkien said he read the book "with avidity", and praised it as a work of philosophy, religion, and morality.
Lindsay attempted to write a more 'commercial' novel with his next work The Haunted Woman (1922), but this was barely more successful than the Voyage. He continued to write novels, including the humorous potboiler The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, but after Devil's Tor in 1932 he found it increasingly difficult to get his work issued, and spent much of his time on his last work The Witch which was not published in his lifetime.
He and his wife opened a boarding house in Brighton, but they did not prosper and their marriage underwent considerable strain. The house was damaged by the first bomb to fall on Brighton in the Second World War and Lindsay, who was in his bath at the time, never recovered from the shock. His death from an infection resulting from an abscess in his tooth was unrelated to the bomb.
Read more about this topic: David Lindsay (novelist)
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