In her “personal record” of D.H. Lawrence published in 1935, Jessie Chambers remembers: Lawrence greatly admired George Borrow. He spent a whole sunny Saturday evening up on the Annesley Hills telling me about Borrow’s life and about Lavengro, making the story so vivid that Borrow seemed to be an actual acquaintance. He said that Borrow had mingled autobiography and fiction so inextricably in Lavengro that the most astute critics could not be sure where the one ended and the other began. From...