Lovecraft’s Selected Letters volume five, page 415, apparently has a reference to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below being given as a Christmas gift to Lovecraft by Ernest A. Edkins. I don’t have access to volume five, never having found it at a cheap price. Can any reader kindly look up and supply the quote please? I’m interested to learn if there is any additional comment there on The World Below.
‘The World Below’ in Selected Letters
22 Friday May 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
20 February 1937
“I do like the few real masterpieces in the field—certain of H. G. Wells’s novels, S. Fowler Wright’s _The World Below,_ & that marvelous piece of imagination by W. Olaf Stapledon, _Last & First Men_”
See also O FORTUNATE FLORIDIAN, Letters to Bloch, ESSENTIAL SOLITUDE, DAWNWARD SPIRE, LONELY HILL, A MEANS TO FREEDOM, Letters to Moe and to Shea.
Many thanks. Joshi’s “Lovecraft’s Library” has the book coming to Lovecraft from Ernest A. Edkins as a gift, rather than from Cook as the letter to Barlow implies. He gives two references, to Selected Letters IV and V – but now I’ve seen both and neither reference has any mention of Edkins. Joshi must have got the Edkins fact from some other source. The importance of this is that if it had come from Cook, we can be fairly sure the book would have been read. Edkins, perhaps less sure.
In LETTERS TO J. VERNON SHEA 125) HPL says “Another friend in Chicago” gave him the book. Presumably Edkins who lived there at the time, I believe.