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A delightful period piece of Paris in the late 1880's, We'll to the Woods No More (Les lauriers sont coupés) retains its importance as the first use of the monologue intérieur and the inspiration for the stream-of-consciousness technique perfected by James Joyce. Dujardin's charming tale, told with insight and irony, recounts what goes on in the mind of a young man-about-town in love with a Parisian actress. Mallarmé described the poetry of the telling as "the instant seized by the throat." Originally published in France in 1887, the first English translation (by Joyce scholar Stuart Gilbert) was published by New Directions in 1938. In 1957 Leon Edel's perceptive historical essay reintroduced the book as "the rare and beautiful case of a minor work which launched a major movement."
This surprising survival has been welcomed by all who know that letters can be the best kind of travelling or bedside reading. George Lyttelton was a retired schoolmaster who began to exchange letters with Rupert Hart-Davis, a London publisher, one of Lyttelton's students at Eton. The correspondence began in 1955 when Lyttelton was 72 and Hart-Davis was 48.