Early Life
He was born in Peckham, London, the son of a civil servant. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Brasenose College, Oxford. There he met the writer Joyce Cary, a lifelong friend.
He met Katherine Mansfield at the end of 1911, through W. L. George. His intense relationship with her, her early death, and his subsequent allusions to it, shaped both his later life and the attitudes (often hostile) of others to him. Leonard Woolf in his memoirs called Murry "Pecksniffian". 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".
Read more about this topic: John Middleton Murry
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