A new scholarly edition of a bold yet overlooked Victorian text that blends the genres of memoir, travelogue, ethnography and the realist novel

Permits students and academic researchers to access more subtle assessments of Lavengro, as well as a range of relevant contexts
Reappraises the relation of Lavengro to nineteenth-century writings on Romani and traveller culture
Explores George Borrow's influence on an array of later Victorian and modernist authors such as Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf.
Surveys and gauges recent debates and critical accounts of George Borrow's life and literary career

This critical edition of George Borrow's Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest (1851) brings a renewed focus on a formally inventive and original text for scholars of the nineteenth-century autobiographical novel and travelogue. This edition reflects and develops research that anchors Borrow's energetically eccentric vision in a range of notable contexts. The scholarly introduction gives readers unfamiliar with the formidably prolific Borrow an opportunity to discover more about this author's career at home and abroad (as a translator for the British and Foreign Bible Society), his stylistic innovations, and how Lavengro evokes a 'wild England' that became crucial for admirers in the next century such as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf.