SOURCE: "Childhood," in his The Inner I: British Literary Autobiography of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 117-37.

In the following excerpt, Finney discusses Cider with Rosie from a Jungian perspective, suggesting that Lee is "attempting to describe the evolution of his individual psyche by relating it to … archetypal images."

[Like Herbert Read, author of the autobiographical The Innocent Eye, Laurie] Lee sees his childhood as an idyll of the past to which he returns in memory for refreshment and renewal. Although longer, Cider With Rosie (1959) has the same air of simplicity verging on naivety which mirrors the child's vision of life. Yet [in his essay 'Writing Autobiography' from I Can't Stay Long] he has subsequently written of its technical complexity. The book occupied him for two years and was written three times. For a start there was the whole problem of compression which brought him face...