Gilbert Murray - An unfinished autobiography

by A. J. Toynbee

THIS MEMOIR contains a fragment of autobiography, as well as seven contributions by friends of Gilbert Murray; one of these supplements the unfinished autobiography, the other pieces deal with various sides of Murray's life and activities. The autobiography began as something different, a memoir of his father and brother; when he came to the chapters in which he himself was the central figure, he had a dislike for carrying it on; he felt that writing an autobiography was egotistical. This accounts for the fragmentary state of what he was persuaded to write.

The book does not deal with all Murray's manifold interests; there is little reference, for instance, to his children, his friendships, or his attitude on particular political and religious issues. The contributors have also been unable to use more than a small part of the great mass of correspondence and other documents that he left. Not all of the documents quoted or cited here have been given complete references, some because they have not been catalogued, while others are letters that have been quoted with the permission of his correspondents but without the use of their names.

The material left by Murray has been given to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and will eventually be made accessible to students; perhaps it may be used some day for writing a life of Gilbert Murray on a larger scale. His correspondence with Lord Russell and with Bernard Shaw is to be published in the near

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future. Meanwhile the present memoir, together with Professor J. A. K. Thompson's in the Proceedings of the British Academy, will have given a picture of Murray partly by his own hand, and partly by the hands of friends who have been able to write with first-hand knowledge.

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