Judith

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Judith is an adventure story which is both romantic and tragic, embracing twin love affairs, and it is also a political drama of considerable poignancy which contains resonances even for the geopolitics of today.

This Introduction sets the scene in 1940s Palestine, on the eve of British withdrawal from the League of Nations Mandate (under which it administered Palestine from 1922 to 1948), with the impending invasion of the newly created state of Israel by its Arab neighbours. It describes the genesis of the novel, and the many elements in Lawrence Durrell’s mind as he was writing it, as well as explaining the discrepancies between the novel and the film of Judith, released by Paramount Pictures in 1966.

The Genesis of Judith

Following the appearance in 1957 of Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, and the republication of the Quartet as a single volume in 1962, Lawrence Durrell rapidly became one of the most celebrated and controversial novelists not only in the English-speaking world but also throughout Europe, thanks to translations of the Quartet into French and German.1 On the strength of this acclaim and notoriety, Durrell was approached in 1960 by Twentieth Century — Fox to write a screenplay for a film about Cleopatra, on which he worked throughout that year and 1961, although he eventually withdrew from that project, and is not named in the film credits.

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