Genius Friend: G. B. Edwards and the Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Edward Chaney (2015-09-21)

Since its publication in 1981, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page has been recognized as the greatest work of literature by a native Guernseyman, and indeed one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Edward Chaney befriended its reclusive author, Gerald Edwards, encouraged him to finish the novel and had it published after he bequeathed him the manuscript. This two-part biography reconstructs Gerald's Guernsey origins and his status as the 'genius friend' of a group of writers who contributed to Middleton Murry's Adelphi in the 1920s. It then documents his descent into obscurity in the 1940s. The second part relates how Chaney met Edwards in Dorset in 1972 and how the novel eventually came to be published and enthusiastically received.