David Lindsay was an Anglo-Scottish fantasy writer whose work has been far more widely read and discussed after his death than it ever was during his lifetime, when his lack of understanding of the literary marketplace, his imperfect knowledge of literary technique, and his obsession with a personal and private vision gained him only a few discerning readers. C. S. Lewis's belated praise for Lindsay's seminal work, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), and a resurgence of interest in sophisticated fantasy, beginning in the 1960s with the paperback sales of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), have helped to arouse considerable interest in Lindsay's writing for scholars of fantastic romances. Though Lindsay's novels have never gained an audience comparable to that of Tolkien, Lewis, or Ursula K. Le Guin, he has still reached a sizable number of readers a generation after his death.

Judgments about the...