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Robert Harris reviews

Robert Harris CBE (born 1957) has had a spectacularly successful career. He went from a humble background in Nottingham, to Cambridge University, and then to the BBC where he worked on flagship news programmes Panorama and Newsnight before becoming political editor of The Observer at the age of just 30.

In the later 1980s he wrote half a dozen factual journalistic books, and then in 1992 published the first of his fiction books, ‘Fatherland’, which became a popular bestseller. Since then he has kept up an impressive workrate, producing a new novel in the popular thriller genre, every three or so years.

The first few were set against the Second World War which has been a recurring setting (‘Fatherland’, ‘Enigma’, ‘Munich’, ‘V2’) but he soon branched out, writing page-turners set in the contemporary world, (‘The Ghost’, ‘The Fear Index’), late nineteenth century France (‘An Officer and a Spy’), the ancient world (‘Pompeii’), the future (‘The Second Sleep’). In 2006 he embarked upon a brilliant trilogy based on the life of Cicero, the leading writer and political player at the time of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian.

Several of Harris’s novels have been adapted into films – for example, The Ghost Writer (2010), An Officer and a Spy (2019) – but he recently hit gold when ‘Conclave’ was made into a movie directed by Edward Berger with award-nominated performances by Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci.

Harris’s novels

1992 Fatherland A brilliantly gripping alternative history in which the Nazis won the Second World War. The story’s protagonist, Xavier March, is an officer of the Kripo, the criminal police, who is investigating the murder of a Nazi government official who participated at the Wannsee Conference. Slowly he realises he has stumbled on a vast conspiracy at the heart of Nazi rule, the Holocaust which, in this world, has been hushed up. The documents March eventually uncovers contain some of the most searing descriptions of going into the gas chambers of a concentration camp I’ve read in any genre.

1995 Enigma Enigma as in the famous code-cracking operation at Bletchley Park. The story focuses on gifted cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, recuperating in Cambridge from a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of work and the breakup of his relationship with Claire Romilly, a cipher clerk, but when he gets back to Cambridge, Claire has gone missing. Who? Why? Where? Another gripping mystery.

1998 Archangel Set in the present: Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso is a historian attending a conference in Moscow. He meets an old communist who tells him about a secret notebook which contains a secret concerning Stalin which threatens to turn history upside down.

2007 The Ghost The unnamed ghost writer who narrates the story, has been hired and flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to help write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, transparently based in Tony Blair, who Harris was close to. The unexplained disappearance of the writer whose place he’s taken prompts the narrator to undertake investigations which (like the previous two thrillers) lead to a momentous revelation.

2011 The Fear Index Also set in the modern world, this concerns the way an artificial intelligence created to dabble in the stock market, runs out of control.

2013 An Officer and a Spy Leaping back a century, this one follows French military intelligence officer Georges Picquart who begins to discover that the evidence used to convict Alfred Dreyfus of espionage was likely invented, in which case a German agent is still at large in the French military.

2016 Conclave Set in the present, this bestseller describes in typically thorough fashion what happens when Pope dies and a conclave is called to elect a new one: taking us into the heart of the process during which various leading contenders turn out to be ineligible for all manner of Machiavellian reasons. Clever, gripping.

2017 Munich Set over four days in September 1938 during the Munich Agreement, the novel describes the activities of two characters, aides to the British and Nazi delegations. This has the structure and mannerisms of the previous thrillers but, for the first time, didn’t have the same ‘grip’. All the historical detail is there, and the panic-stricken meetings and the twists and turns. Except we know this changed nothing. The Second World War still came. So who cares?

2019 Second Sleep Set in the future after some disaster has set England back to medieval technology and culture. In this world a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives at a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor to bury a priest who has died ‘in mysterious circumstances’. Slowly he realises the locals are concealing a secret i.e. the book builds to the same kind of Revelation that characterised Harris’s first half dozen novels. Except the final revelation is deeply underwhelming: we find out that the Old World (i.e. our world) experienced some catastrophic breakdown of its digital infrastructure. This is deeply disappointing because a) we knew right from the start that this was a future after some catastrophe; b) so it is just like many, many other science fiction novels set in the future after some catastrophe wiped out ‘our’ culture, all the ones I’m familiar with (The Chrysalids, A Canticle for Leibowitz) being much, much better; and c) the final revelation, that the satellites which keep global digital tech working all crashed, is not really a believable cause for a worldwide apocalypse. OK there’d be disasters but surely we’d just revert to life in the 1970s before digital tech: cars would still drive, food would still grow, not as much but still quite a lot; livestock would be farmed etc etc. The idea that the end of digital tech would devastate the world beyond recognition is not plausible or thrilling. This is the first Harris novel I read but couldn’t be bothered to review because it’s the first one that’s actively bad.

The Cicero trilogy

A brilliant trilogy of novels describing the fraught political career of ancient Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC). They manage to stick very closely to the historical record while at the same time conveying the genuine excitement and danger of 1st century BC Rome.

2006 Imperium All three are narrated by Cicero’s secretary, Tiro. This first volume covers 15 years and is divided into two parts: Part one, ‘Senator’ (79 to 70 BC) leading up to Cicero’s career-making prosecution of a corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres; Part two, ‘Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)’ covers his campaign to be elected consul, which becomes entangled with a major plot by Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus to stitch up control of the Roman state.

2009 Lustrum Continues Cicero’s career in fraught first century BC Rome, as related by his secretary Tiro. It covers the next five years in Cicero’s life and career (the Latin word lustrum referring to the religious sacrifice offered every five years by state officials)and is again divided into two parts: Part one ‘Consul’, covers the dramatic year of 63 BC giving a thrilling description of the slow escalation of the crisis which developed into Lucius Sergius Catalina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state. Part two, ‘Pater Patriae’, covers the next four years, 62 to 58 BC: beneath a blizzard of more overt incidents and challenges, the two underlying themes are the unstoppable rise of Caesar and his creation of the First Triumvirate (in 60 BC).

2015 Dictator The final book in the trilogy covers the last 15 years of Cicero’s life, from 58 BC to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC. It’s divided into Part one, ‘Exile’ (58 to 47 BC), and Part two ‘Redux (47 to 43 BC), leading up to Cicero’s flight form Rome and eventual murder by agents of Mark Anthony’s. Outstanding.

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by Simon on March 27, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 27, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/robert-harris-reviews/

Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess (1985)

Man belonged to the cosmos and was fulfilled through his natural instincts, of which love was the greatest.
(Burgess’s summary of Lawrence’s credo, page 62)

Anthony Burgess (1917 to 1993) was a composer, poet, novelist, essayist, librettist, screenwriter, critic, provocateur and media personality. In the 1980s I watched him appear on TV arts programmes and read his numerous book reviews, essays and novels (notably ‘Earthly Powers’, 1980, and ‘The End of the World News’, 1982). He was great fun, an unashamed entertainer. This book is a classic example of his work: opinionated, interesting, drily amusing, sensible, packed with ideas and insights.

Preface

Part of this is because Burgess, like Lawrence, was an outsider. Most 20th century English authors went to private school and Oxbridge and so, whether they were radicals or conservatives, maintained the same kind of tone and worldview, the same manners, the same limited, privileged experience of life in their works. Burgess, as he explains in his preface, grew up in the pub and shop culture of working class Manchester, with little cultural capital and, like Lawrence, largely had to teach himself about literature. And they both married foreign wives and left England to live abroad, Lawrence in his pilgrimage round the world, Burgess to live in Monte Carlo.

That said, Burgess says there are also big differences. Burgess came of an Irish family and was raised a Catholic. This explains his attraction to James Joyce. But also puts him in a different tradition from Lawrence who came from non-conformist stock, proud of his puritanism, attracted to the old pagan gods, son of a miner.

Burgess admires Lawrence’s intransigence and sympathises with his sufferings on behalf of free expression. Lawrence stands for:

that fighting element in the practice of literature without which books are a mere decor or confirmation of the beliefs and prejudices of the ruling class. (p.x)

‘Literature is essentially subversive’ and Lawrence was a leading practitioner of that subversion.

Chapter 1. Lawrence and Myself When Young

Burgess quotes Lawrence’s biographer and critic Richard Aldington saying Joyce and Lawrence are diametrically opposed: Joyce is about being and Lawrence is about becoming.

Stylistically Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness which looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. (p.4)

This strikes me as the single most important aspect of Lawrence’s style as a writer of prose and poetry. His paragraphs feel like they’re being shaped and formed, often reusing the same words and phrases, as you watch. It’s a unique experience of being involved in the writing, as it happens.

His writing does not seem to have emerged, lathed and polished, from the workshop: when we read him we are in that workshop, witnessing a hit-and-miss process of creation in which orthodox faults – prolixity, repetition, apparent absurdity – are idiosyncratic virtues. (p.9)

He is a writer taking chances and trusting that he will be taken seriously.

In the 1910s literature was influenced by the serious scientific predictions of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw with their promotion of Scientific, Rational solutions to society’s ills. Lawrence reacted against all this, despised all politics – maybe all rationality – and spoke for the Natural Man.

The purest exponent of the Natural Man after the Great War was Ernest Hemingway who saw that the complex sentences of Edwardian literature reflected a society and values which had all been exploded. He developed a stripped back, simple and repetitive style which promoted a simplistic code of honour. I like where Burgess says:

It may be that Hemingway’s prose is the biggest stylistic innovation of the century… Hemingway genuinely starts again from scratch. (p.8)

When I was a schoolboy and student, that was my view. From E.M. Forster to Ernest Hemingway was a leap from the 19th into the 20th century and, reading literary books today, they almost all still copy the Hemingway formula: short sentences, simple vocabulary, delete all adjectives and adverbs.

The pre-scientific or irrational in Lawrence made him a genuine primitive man, a pagan. He has a profound feeling for the pagan gods. Even the books set in England contain characters who talk like pagan deities. His people aspire to be naked, and their dialogue is voices from the unconscious, from another realm of experience.

Chapter 2. Beginnings

Lawrence’s father was a miner who worked at Brinsley Colliery, Eastwood, so you might have expected Lawrence’s subject to be squalor, dirt and struggle, for him to have become a proletarian writer. But Eastwood, ten miles north-east of Nottingham, in his day looked out over countryside, and Lawrence chose instead to become a writer of the countryside, flowers and animals.

Lawrence’s parents’ marriage was a warzone. His father was a miner, technically a ‘butty’ or supervisor of a gang of other miners. He was almost illiterate, spelling out the newspaper a word at a time, whereas Lawrence’s mother had been a teacher and clung to the idea that she came of gentle stock. Lawrence was unusually close to his mother – she is the central figure in his first major novel Sons and Lovers, and he was devastated when she died – but, by the same token, he was impressed by his father’s big beefy masculinity and the sodality of the miners.

Lawrence was an amateur painter till he was 20. His surviving paintings are vivid but demonstrate his complete lack of training in perspective or anatomy. Words were different. Poems and prose bent to the force of his imagination with little or no training.

At 17 he went as a pupil-teacher to Ilkeston training centre. At 21 he went to Nottingham University. Aged 23 he went to teach in Croydon. He discovered the ‘English Review’, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, who ‘had the greatest editorial flair of his time, if not of the century’ and sent in some poems (p.20). Hueffer recognised the boy’s genius, invited him up to tea, introduced him to Ezra Pound. Lawrence showed Hueffer his first novel, ‘The White Peacock’.

Burgess makes a characteristically sweeping statement:

One of the uses of fiction is to affirm the values of the bourgeoisie. (p.24)

Lawrence is ‘this most visual of novelists’. Burgess emphasises the brilliant physical details in so many scenes.

Joyce, by contrast, was an urban man and knew nothing of flowers. Lawrence is the great novelist of flowers.

Snobbishness Lawrence’s mother felt she married down when she married his father. She aspired for her boys, wanted them to climb the social ladder. This is reflected from as early as ‘The Peacock’, with characters saying ‘awfully’ and ‘frightfully’, words never used in the Lawrence household. He was aping his social superiors, he was pitching the narrative at a higher social level.

Chapter 3. The Denial of Life

Lawrence’s second novel, ‘The Trespasser’, was published in 1912. It’s set on the Isle of Wight which was as far abroad as he’d managed to get by that point. The lead character Siegmund, hangs himself. The is the only suicide in Lawrence’s oeuvre.

In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Richtofen, the wife of his French tutor at Nottingham University, philologist and professor of modern languages, Ernest Weekley. She describes how they fell in love in her memoir, Not I, but the Wind…, how she was forced to abandon her three children when they eloped abroad, ending up in a rented house on Lake Garda in north Italy.

Mr Noon: Lawrence drafted the first part of this novel before the war. It was published as a fragment in 1934. Only 50 years later, in 1984, was the second part, which existed in papers belonging to a friend of Lawrence’s, published. The two halves or parts were first published together in 1984. The second half is quite different from the first. It appears to be a factually accurate and barely fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda’s early sexual relations. Burgess makes the point that:

It was common practice for Lawrence to write half a novel, abandon it, and then pick it up again with no great concern for plausible continuity; when in doubt, change your main character’s character, though retaining the name, and make him or her start a new life somewhere, preferably in Italy. (p.33)

This happens in ‘Mr Noon’, ‘The Lost Girl’ and ‘Aaron’s Rod’.

Marriage It is amusing that Lawrence was very fierce for marital fidelity, had a pagan reverence for the union of one man and one woman and yet the partner of his life was secured by wrecking her marriage to Professor Weekley. Also ironic that Frieda was (allegedly) unfaithful to him.

Anywhere Lawrence was one of those rare writers who could write anywhere, even amid noise and distractions. He never had a permanent home and so no book-lined study, was able to be interrupted mid-sentence to meet people or go and do some chore, come back hours later and pick up where he left off. In the relationship with Frieda, he did all the household chores while she lay in bed smoking. He reflected this aspect of himself in the character of Rawdon Lilly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’:

He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid. (Aaron’s Rod, p.121)

England, My England Soon after eloping, Burgess quotes letters in which Lawrence lambasted the English and England in extreme terms. And yet he remained an Englishman through and through. Richard Aldington amusingly said Lawrence was as English as a wet Sunday in Hull.

Son and Lovers Another joke: given the theme of this novel is a young man’s struggle to break free from the smothering influence of his mother, Frieda playfully suggested it should be titled ‘Sons and Lovers: Or, His Mother’s Darling’. Lawrence was not amused.

Chapter 4. Son and Lover

David Herbert Lawrence was called Bert in the family home. He disliked his first name. After he eloped and became more cosmopolitan he liked his female admirers, starting with Frieda, to call him Lorenzo.

‘Sons and Lovers’ was published in May 1913. Giving its protagonist the French surname Morel is symptomatic of Lawrence’s aspiring cosmopolitanism. Burgess describes it as a ‘florescent, leafy, pullulent’ book (p.50).

Lawrence’s modernism lies not in the formal technique of his novels: they display none of the agonising over technique obvious in Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James or Joyce. The modernism is in the content for two reasons to do with the characters.

1) His characters’ identities are extraordinarily labile: they change all the time. Not just that, but sometimes they disappear altogether, subsumed into the weather, the moonlight or other settings or environments.

2) All Lawrence’s characters point away from the conventions of normal social life towards primeval depths. They repeatedly sink to, or strip back layers to reveal, the elemental layer of human existence. This is deeper than anything in the history of the novel, deeper even than the Greeks in their tragedies.

Symptomatic that, ‘no strong believer in the solidity of human identities’ Lawrence had a lifelong fondness for charades (p.54). This spilled over into the best poems where he mimics or inhabits a bird, beast or flower to an extraordinary degree.

Masculinity All his life Lawrence kept a reverence for beautiful men, for the beauty of the male body, linking back to the strong nudity of his coal-miner father (stripped to the waist and washing in a tin bath every evening) and the community of tough men he managed.

Chapter 5. Coming Through

Lawrence was ‘arrogant, dogmatic, messianic, inconsistent’ but also loveable. He wasn’t troubled by his own faults or the impression they gave in society because society was a spume, a phantom: reality lay much, much deeper, and chasing, revealing and describing the depths of human experience was his challenge.

Reason Lawrence never understood rational argument, which was a kind of giving-in to the surface, the superficial, instead of seeking the core.

Friendship pattern The success of ‘Sons and Lovers’ introduced him to the upper echelons of English culture and society and inaugurated the rhythm he enacted with almost everyone he met: 1) ingratiating charm; 2) lecturing about eternal depths which they barely understood; 3) bitter rejection and immortalisation as satirised characters in whichever novel he was working on; 4) with the frequent threat of libel action (p.55).

‘Love Poems and Others’ published February 1913. In the summer Lawrence and Frieda returned from Germany to England principally because Frieda wanted to see her three children by Weekley.

In the autumn of 1913 he wrote a good deal of The Rainbow, provisionally titled ‘The Sisters’. In July 1914 Frieda’s divorce came through and the couple came to London to sign the papers, then get married. A few weeks later the Great War erupted and they were trapped in England for four long bitter years.

Chapter 6. Dementia

The Lawrences didn’t have money to pay the lawyers’ fees for the divorce so he was declared bankrupt. In December The Prussian Officer and Other Stories was published. In 1915 the odd story England, My England‘. Lawrence is always unsettling because he says the uncomfortable, inconvenient thing.

In 1915 Lawrence worked on ‘The Sisters’ and decided to divide it in two. He developed the notion of setting up a commune of like-minded artistic people in Cornwall. He tried to recruit Lady Ottoline Morrell for this. He wrote long letters raving about the collapse of British society to poor Bertrand Russell, with whom he was initially very taken before they had a huge falling out. Russell accused him (after his death) of being a proto-fascist.

Lawrence said he rewrote ‘The Rainbow’ about seven times. It was published on 30 September 1915. Just a week later, a negative review in the Daily News triggered outcry at the book’s supposed obscenity. The book was taken to court for breaching obscenity laws. Many witnesses for the prosecution and none for the defence. Lawrence wasn’t called. His publisher, Methuen, meekly apologised, withdrew the book, pulped the remaining copies and paid a fine of ten guineas. Britain’s writers did nothing. The Society of Authors did nothing. That maligned figure, Arnold Bennett, was the sole author to publicly protest (he had already sent the impoverished author a gift of £40).

The impact was to ruin Lawrence’s reputation, livelihood and career. It delayed publication of the second half of the novel, Women In Love, by five years, giving the misleading impression that it is a book of the 1920s, which it very much isn’t.

Burgess, of course, defends ‘The Rainbow’ but even he, in his summary, zeroes in and quotes some of the passages describing sex (in extremely vague and gaseous way). He himself doesn’t convey how much of the novel isn’t about sex at all, but about the tempestuous and primeval emotions of the characters, described in an amazingly impassioned prose.

In my review of The Rainbow I point out that with the arrival of Ursula to young womanhood the novel drastically changes tone, moving out of its kind of primitive pagan rural background and arriving in the modern world of schools and trams. Burgess makes the nice point that this is the ‘Wellsian mode’, the tone of Ann Veronica and Wells’s Edwardian social novels.

Chapter 7. Westward

Lawrence fantasised about setting up a colony of like-minded artists in America, maybe Florida, until the authorities made it clear he couldn’t leave the country. So he settled on Cornwall where he founded an artistic community. Two leading figures were the gifted editor John Middleton Murry and the brilliant New Zealand short story writer, Katherine Mansfield.

Lawrence was at one point so close to Murry that he suggested becoming blood brothers. The quartet shared a cottage for a while but inevitably fell out. Nearly 20 years later Murray was cruelly satirised as the slimy seducer Denis Burlap in Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Point Counter Point’.

In Cornwall Lawrence revised part two of The Sisters, which came to be titled Women in Love. He finished in November 1916 but could find no publisher. July 1916, his travel book about his time in Italy, Twilight in Italy, was published.

During this period he was summoned to several Army medicals in Bodmin. He was always rejected but found the poking and prodding of his body deeply humiliating. His horrible wartime experiences are dramatised in the long, brilliantly vivid ‘Nightmare’ chapter in ‘Kangaroo’.

Lawrence spoke openly against the madness of the war. His wife was German. On 12 October 1917 local police raided his home and ransacked it for evidence they were spies, signalling to German U-boats with their washing or their late-night lights. No evidence was found but Lawrence was ordered to leave Cornwall.

Lawrence and Frieda went to stay with H.D. in London. He started writing Aaron’s Rod. In November 1917 the poetry collection ‘Look! We Have Come Through’ was published. In 1918 they went to live in Derbyshire. In October ‘New Poems’ came out. As soon as the war finished (November 1918) they set about leaving England but it took a year, until October 1919, before they could get passports.

During this period Lawrence did the reading for his book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature, which was eventually published by Thomas Seltzer in the United States in August 1923. It contains essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. It contributed to establishing Herman Melville as a seminal figure in American literature.

Some critics criticise it for being a rushed, superficial and highly impressionistic study; Burgess calls it ‘a series of jolts and lunges… meant to jolt Americans’ into reading their great authors. He claims it is one of the few books which created an entire new discipline, as it apparently helped jolt Americans into creating course of America literature at their universities.

Chapter 8. Nakedness

Burgess devotes an entire chapter to ‘Women in Love‘ which Burgess considers one of the ten great novels of the century. The central point of the novel is the way the characters are stripped down to their essentials, stripped to their primitive emotional cores which are depicted as bubbling over with extreme emotions, continually changing.

They are not human beings as we expect to meet them either in real life or in fiction. They are close to animals in the discontinuousness of their emotions, with unpredictable shifts of feeling which are always intense… they are capable of great emotional and even physical violence; they seem to have a skin missing. This is the peculiar quality of Women in Love which could as well be called Women in Hate. (p.89)

He outlines the main characters, identifies some of their real-life bases (Rupert Birkin is Lawrence, Hermione Roddice was partly based on Ottoline Morrell, Gudrun bears many of the traits of Katherine Mansfield).

Burgess singles out three big scenes: 1) how the violence of the big half-wild rabbit scene, in which it scratches and draws blood from both Gudrun and Gerald, anticipates the violence of their relationship and his final attempt to murder her.

2) When Ursula comes across Rupert throwing stones at the reflection of the moon in the millpond to try and abolish the power of the feminine moon over him.

3) The naked wrestling scene between Birkin and the mine owner Gerald Crich, which is deeper than homoerotic, far more primal, and its sad incompletion, the way Gerald can’t rise to Birkin’s wishes.

If we are startled by this scene we are merely experiencing the shock that it was Lawrence’s lifelong mission to impart – the shock of meeting [elemental] truths which logic and science… have tried to drive out. (p.96)

Burgess thinks it is a great novel because it is completely new: the novel, as a form, is mostly concerned with people in a social context, it is the quintessentially bourgeois art form, hedged round by manners and etiquette. From Samuel Richardson through Jane Austen to Henry James and E.M. Forster, the most earnest novels had always been about social convention and good manners. Lawrence tears the face off all this and shows his characters as madly irrational complexes of blood and nerves; primal, pagan wild animals: they have a social face (they have jobs and responsibilities) but their private lives are thronged with out-of-control primeval forces, ‘naked primitives’.

He makes the further point that the novel, up to that point, existed to convey a plot, a story. In their different ways Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford showed that you could achieve new literary heights by jettisoning the straitjacket of a logical plot and instead showing human reality in a heightened form.

Chapter 9. A Snake and Sardinia

Burgess is dismissive of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, the novel Lawrence began in 1918, set aside, then completed in the spring of 1921. ‘It is a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’ (p.101).

More interesting is The Lost Girl, which he had also abandoned, and now took up and completed. It is a hokey tale in the popular style of Arnold Bennett with lots of authorial buttonholing – ‘Now fancy our two young heroes walking up the steps to the hotel…’ and, being absolutely unthreatening, won a literary prize and £100.

Lawrence and Frieda visited Florence, which he liked. He fancied it a place of manliness and virile statues, now gone to seed and packed with a large expatriate British community of ‘aesthetes’. Some of these are portrayed pretty blatantly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’ leading to accusations of bad manners and caddishness.

They moved on to Sardinia, then to Sicily where they found a cottage where they lived, off and on, for two years. The stay in Sardinia inspired Sea and Sardinia the most charming book Lawrence ever wrote and, in Burgess’s opinion, the best single introduction to his oeuvre.

Chapter 10. The Prophecy is in the Poetry

This chapter covers:

  1. Lawrence’s best book of poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers
  2. his two works triggered by Freud, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
  3. his final, posthumous work, Apocalypse

Chapter 11. Eastward

1921, year of The Captain’s Doll, in which the captain and his German paramour turn into Lawrence and Frieda, endlessly bickering, with their famously arduous trek up a glacier during which they bickered and argued every inch of the way there and back.

In October 1921 ‘Sea and Sardinia’ was serialised in The Dial magazine and was read by the American socialite Mrs Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was starting an artists’ community in Taos, New Mexico, with the aim of preserving the arts and crafts of the local Indians. She fancied having a writer-in-residence to record the way of life and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ convinced her that D.H. was the man. She wrote offering him free board and lodging and Lawrence bit.

He and Frieda decided to visit America not by crossing the Atlantic but by heading East. They took ship from Naples in February 1922, passed through the Suez Canal arriving at Ceylon in March. He discovered he really hated tropical jungles.

They sailed on to Australia, arriving at Perth at the start of May 1922 and stayed with friends for a fortnight. Staying in a town outside Perth they met Maria Louisa Skinner, a minor writer who was emboldened to show Lawrence her manuscript of a novel. For reasons that puzzle Lawrence scholars to this day, he was inspired to take it up as a collaboration and rewrite it the Lawrence way. It was eventually published as The Boy in the Bush with Skinner credited as co-author. Burgess thinks Lawrence collaborated because Australia made a big impact on him but he simply wasn’t there long enough to pick up the local lore. This manuscript was packed with local lore and just needed the psychological depth which he tried to add.

After just two weeks, they took ship to Sydney. He only stayed here two days (too expensive) before heading to a house 50 kilometres south.

Chapter 12. A Comical-Looking Bloke

Here Lawrence wrote Kangaroo which Burgess calls ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It was an improvisation i.e. he set off without having a plot or characters but the book’s slapdash unevenness of tone 1) allows for all kinds of elements, including extended lyrical descriptions of the Australian landscape and 2) creates an overall sense of spontaneity and immediacy which is very appealing.

Kangaroo’s main characters are transparently based on Lawrence and Frieda, being Richard Lovat Somers, an English writer, and his wife Harriet, who has a foreign look. They arrive in Sydney, find a house to rent. The neighbours are a childless couple and the husband, Jack Callcott, explains he’s a member of a secretive authoritarian political movement, the Diggers, who are seeking to overthrow democracy. He introduces Lovat to their leader, a charismatic Jewish lawyer named Ben Cooley and codenamed ‘Kangaroo’.

Burgess points out that the novel is about types of power:

  • there is an entire chapter devoted to the dynamic of Frieda and Lawrence’s marriage, and Lawrence’s preposterous efforts to convince her that she should submit to him as lord and master, which she robustly ridicules
  • the political plot, sort of, about the Diggers and Cooley, although his so-called ideology is disappointingly wishy-washy, all about love of your fellow men, and Colley asks Somers (in several embarrassingly bad scenes) to love him

The plot, such as it is, leads up to a riot at a meeting of the Australian Socialist Party, which is attacked by a phalanx of pseudo-fascist Diggers, complete with gunshots, a bomb being thrown, and Kangaroo being mortally wounded. Burgess points out how all this is prefaced by an extended passage about the nature of the ‘mob’, reminiscent of Freud’s work ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ which had just come out (in 1921), which Burgess says ‘shows an acuteness worthy of Adolf Hitler’ (p.142). I found it, like most of Lawrence’s attempts to tackle serious political or sociological issues, so wordy, so convoluted, and so embroiled with his personal mythology around the sexes and the deep gods, as to be almost unreadable.

Burgess briskly summarises that Lovat cannot give his allegiance to Kangaroo because the latter’s philosophy of brotherly love is shallow piffle beside Lovat’s deep feeling for the dark gods lying behind everything, deeper than humanity.

In a side note, Burgess picks out one of the final scenes of Lovat walking by moonlight by the seashore as being as magical and symbolic as Burkin throwing stones in the millpond to break the image of the moon in ‘Women in Love’. Lawrence’s novels overflow with wonderful, wonderful nature descriptions.

Chapter 12. Quetzalcoatl

After their Australian sojourn Lawrence and Frieda continued their odyssey east, arrived in San Francisco and took train to the artists’ community at the pueblo town of Taos, New Mexico, in the south-west USA. They had, as you recall, been invited by its owner Mabel Dodge Luhan, the American socialite, who had read Lawrence’s poetry and thought he’d be a perfect fit.

They were found a ranch fifteen or so miles from the town and endured a tough and demanding winter in its very primitive conditions, helped by a couple of Danish artists they sub-let some outhouses to.

By spring 1923 they needed a break and Lawrence took Frieda to Mexico. After some weeks in Mexico City, they headed south west and settled in a house on Lake Chapala. Over the next few years they made three trips in all. Out of them came a long novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), an epic 462 pages in the Penguin edition, and the travel book, Mornings in Mexico (1927).

Burgess gives a workmanlike summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ but doesn’t do this vast, complex, brilliant and ridiculous book justice. He calls it ‘the least liked of Lawrence’s novels and one can see why’. It is humourless, and pontificates, at length, on a subject of little interest to most English readers (a couple of Mexicans leading the rise of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl ).

One key point I nearly forgot by the time I’d staggered to the end of it, is that it, also, was very obviously written at two different times. The opening chapters are written in a surprisingly pared-back prose, lacking the usual Lawrentian guff, repetition and rhetoric. Almost as if he’d been reading Hemingway (who, however, hadn’t published much yet). Whereas the second half, describing the proponents of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is an orgy of half-baked mysticism, pseudo-psychology and tedious ‘hymns’.

Burgess suggests the difference in style is explained by facts on the ground. After 6 months Frieda was fed up of Mexico’s searing heat and (probably) Lawrence’s insistence on her submission to his religious fantasies. So she booked a berth on a ship from New York back to Britain (as the novel’s protagonist Kate Leslie, also does). On the New York quayside they had such an intense argument that they for a while thought the marriage was over.

He travelled west across America, stopping in the young Hollywood, before making it back to Mexico City. Here he completed the novel unrestrained by Frieda’s presence and influence. So you could argue that the first, very restrained and unLawrentian half, with its sensible characters doing believable things, was written under Frieda’s influence; and that the wildly self-indulgent second half, a fantasia of the new religion, accompanied by long poem-hymns he attributes to the new religionists, is Lawrence unleashed.

In real life Lawrence for a while felt he had lost Frieda and that, in her insistence on being free, independent and going her own way (home), she had ‘won’ their endless battle; whereas in the novel, Lawrence has the very strong character Kate Leslie in the end bow and submit to the male principle of her dark native husband. I.e. in the novel Lawrence faked that he’d won. In reality he swallowed his pride, and also took ship to Britain, ending in London where he realised just how much he disliked the English.

In his brisk summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ Burgess doesn’t mention the book’s countless breath-takingly beautiful prose descriptions of the Mexican landscape and mood. Equivalents to the wonderful evocation of the Australian landscape in ‘Kangaroo’. In both these novels, for my money, the ‘plot’ is dubious but the sense of place is astonishing.

Burgess thinks ‘there is no less convincing ending in the Lawrence oeuvre’ (p.157) but I found the ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ appropriately ambiguous and uncertain. It just stops in mid-conversation as the protagonist, Kate Leslie, rather hopelessly asks the Mexican general she’s married and who wants her to join their religious movement, Cipriano Viedma, to make her stay with him – despite the fact that we’ve seen her pining for Britain and booking a berth on a ship home. It ends on a note of irresolution and ambiguity which, I thought, accurately sums up the Lawrentian protagonist, endlessly conflicted and contradictory and changeable.

Chapter 13. A Spot of Red

In London Frieda and Lawrence became close to the artist (the Right Honourable) Dorothy Brett, and she accompanied them when they sailed back across the Atlantic in March 1924. They travelled from New York to Chicago and then back to Taos. Here Mable Luhan gave the Lawrences 170 acres of land and Lawrence, always surprisingly practical, threw himself (alongside native labourers) into rebuilding the adobe shacks, clearing the irrigation ditches, planting a flower garden.

In this period Lawrence wrote St Mawr. Like so many of Lawrence’s fictions it splits into two distinct parts (England and America), maybe three (London, Shropshire, Texas). The first, longer part portrays the posh, upper-middle-class world Lawrence was now moving in (the miner’s son had come a long, long way in a little over 10 years), set in London mews cottages and posh grand houses.

St Mawr is the name of a horse, a stallion, bought by Mrs Witt, a redoubtable American widow of independent means, for her son-in-law Henry Carrington, so he can join her and her daughter, Louise (Lou), as they go riding in Rotten Row (in Hyde Park) and mingle with London’s elite. Here the nervy, uncontrollable horse causes a scene and is banned as a danger to the public.

The scene then shifts to the West Midlands on the Welsh border, where a posse of posh people go for an extended break and where St Mawr is startled by a snake in the heather and rears backwards, kicking one of the men in the party in the face then rolling onto Henry and crushing his foot.

In part two, the leading figure, Mrs Witt, takes daughter, son-in-law and difficult horse by ship back to America, to the ranch where she grew up and whose profits pay for her pampered lifestyle travelling round Europe (and which explains why she and her daughter like horses).

But they don’t stop here. Lou looks for somewhere isolated where she can be herself and discovers a half-abandoned old ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and buys it, and persuades her mother to join her and the family retainer, a native American named Phoenix, in rebuilding and furbishing it.

Burgess makes the obvious point that the entire narrative arc of the story follows Lawrence’s recent life, from posh nobs in London, via an excursion into the English countryside, then back to the States, to the dusty desert reminiscent of Taos, and then the final 20 pages are a pretty literal description of the ranch which Mabel Luhan, with great generosity, gave to Lawrence.

Burgess goes on to make the fairly obvious point which I’d completely missed that St Mawr is Lawrence: wounded, angry, liable to lash out. When the horse kicks a nice posh chap in the face up in the Shropshire hills it is Lawrence spitting in the face of the posh people he met in London and claimed to love his work and who he loathed. In fact St Mawr overflows with hatred of just about everyone, as I itemise in my review of it.

According to Burgess, right at the end of 1924 Lawrence travelled with Frieda and Brett back to Mexico. The British vice-consul found them a cottage in Oaxaca and it was here that he completed ‘The Plumed Serpent’, in all its madness.

He also completed the odd book of travel sketches combined with anthropological reportage, ‘Mornings in Mexico’. The book starts out as restrained and observant sketches of his hacienda, his servant, a long walk to a remote village and a description of a market day; but then the second half and the last three or four chapters become more anthropological, describing trips to observe traditional Indian music and dances, and taking it on himself to explain the Indians’ entire animistic worldview. Several of these chapters do not take place in Mexico at all, but in the United States, so the title of the book is pretty misleading.

Here in Oaxaca, in early 1925, Lawrence fell very ill. He went down with malaria but also food poisoning causing diarrhoea. To compound his misery, the region was hit by an earthquake. He was moved to the one decent hotel in Oaxaca. He was left weak and ill. All the old fight went out of him. For years he had written fantasies of subjecting Frieda to his imperious male will. Now he could barely walk and realised how utterly dependent on her he had become.

A doctor in Mexico City diagnosed tuberculosis and told Frieda that Lawrence only had a year or two left to live. When they tried to return to Taos the US immigration officials prevented him, until overridden by a kindly official in the embassy in Mexico City. But only with a 6-month visa.

In the event Lawrence recovered back on the ranch and was fit enough to get involved in all manner of outdoor chores and work. Burgess dwells on his finding a porcupine with cactus needles in its nose and carefully extracting them, which led to one of his many essays about man’s place in nature.

In September 1925 his US visa expired, he travelled to Washington with Frieda, then they caught a liner back across the Atlantic. He kidded himself he’d come back but, of course, he never did. His ranch is now a museum dedicated to him, the D.H. Lawrence ranch.

Lawrence disapproved of the Atlantic – ‘a dismal kind of ocean; it always affects me as the grave of Atlantis’ – although not as much as he disapproved of England.

Chapter 14. Life in Death

Lawrence passed through England en route for the continent. Burgess thinks Italy was Lawrence’s true home and the Mediterranean his proper sea. By the autumn of 1925 they had settled at a place called Spotorno, on the coast just over the border from France. Here he turned 40.

Burgess summarises Lawrence’s life to date: he had travelled right around the world looking for a race unspoiled by western materialism but hadn’t found it. He had hated the tropics (Ceylon), ignored the native people of Australia, seen the corruption and lassitude of the Mexicans, hated America’s Fordist culture, loathed England’s imperial snobbery.

Etruscan Places Now, back in Italy, he persuaded himself he’d found it in the long-extinct and legendary race of the Etruscans. Hence his book Etruscan Places. The Etruscans created a civilisation in west and north-west Italy which reached its height around 500 BC. To Lawrence’s mind they were an example of a primitive people in touch with their sensual pagan selves who were crushed out of existence by the cerebral, law-obsessed, imperialistic Romans.

This is obviously a grotesque distortion of the historical facts since 1) if crushed they were, it was by the Roman Republic, centuries before there was a Roman Empire (see Roman–Etruscan Wars), 2) the Romans were indeed an obsessively militaristic culture but at the same time they also practiced a florid variety of blood-thirsty cults, traditions and ceremonies which you’d have thought Lawrence would have had sympathy for.

But really what Lawrence does is reshape the Etruscans into his own image, as embattled outsiders fighting several types of ‘establishment’. This is why the book opens with an attack on all historians of the ancient world who Lawrence accuses of being in thrall to the glamour of Greece and Rome and downplaying all other cultures.

And, as Burgess points out, when Lawrence was anathematising an empire which crushed scores of native peoples in the name of ‘freedom’ he was also obviously referring to the British Empire, whose subjugation of native peoples around the world Lawrence deplored.

The Man Who Died Burgess devotes 4 pages to a summary of this vivid short story depicting Jesus waking from the dead in his tomb. In the story Jesus stumbles out and takes shelter with a peasant before the several encounters with disciples described in the New Testament.

These encounters are given according to the Biblical sources but we see that the resurrected man who lived them is radically different from the Jesus of the Bible account. For he has thrown off his mission to convert the world to love. He now sees all that as a form of narcissism. Now he will live for the instinctive life within him i.e. become Lawrentian man.

And so in the second half of the story (and, as Burgess points out, so many of Lawrence’s stories and novels fall into two distinct halves) he travels south along the coast. Here he comes to a small domestic temple to the goddess Isis and falls under the spell of its priestess, culminating in their having sex at the pagan altar.

Burgess doesn’t quite bring out how brilliantly vivid and imaginative this story is, with scores of moments of insight, starting with the searing description of what it feels like to rise from the dead – but he correctly points out the other striking thing about it which is – why wasn’t it banned? Why wasn’t Lawrence prosecuted for blasphemy? What kind of story could possibly be more blasphemous? Instead, as we know, the Establishment reserved its fury for his next novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s always sex with the philistine, guttersnipe British, who are too thick to notice transgressive ideas.

Chapter 15. A Woman’s Love

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a book about fidelity. Lady Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors must be true to each other and what they awaken in each other – a true awakening of their bodies’ sensual and sexual identities – despite the full panoply of opposition society can throw at them: gossip and rumour, social disapproval, censure from her father and sister, the howling anger of his shrewish wife, the cold anger of her husband, and the minefields of the law.

He began it at Scandicci in Italy in October 1926 and over the next two years wrote three versions. Many critics think the shorter first version is best, but it was the longest version which he chose to have privately printed in 1928.

Burgess correctly points out that for a book which supposedly champions free and ecstatic sex, ‘Chatterley’ is embarrassingly limited and ignorant. Lawrence is embarrassingly fixated on the penis, the phallus, on Mellors’s erect penis, and the sex is entirely orientated around his quick phallic penetration of Lady C. There is little or no foreplay and no attention whatsoever is given to Connie’s pleasure or orgasm. She is condemned to find all her pleasure in response to his quick thrusting cock.

As Burgess says, not just any modern westerner with an interest in the subject, but any literate member of the world’s other cultures, readers of Japanese, Chinese or India erotica, would know vastly more than Lawrence describes. Lawrence’s supposed sex set-pieces make us look like an embarrassment on the world stage. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ only counts as a ‘sexy’ book when set against the narrow, blinkered, strangled, philistine background of early 20th century Anglo-Saxon culture. Compared with the erotic writings of virtually any other tradition, it is pitifully inadequate.

Burgess is critical of it. He thinks Connie isn’t as interesting a female figure as Ursula, Gudrun (who is?) or Kate Leslie, while her desertion of a crippled husband subverts her moral standing. Mellors is less attractive than the gamekeeper in The White Peacock. In my reading, I didn’t like Mellors. He is unnecessarily chippy and shirty with Clifford and, especially with the painter Duncan Forbes who offers to help them out and Mellors rudely dismisses. By the end I didn’t like either of the lovers. My sympathy went out to Mrs Bolton, a battling single mum from the village who comes to be Clifford’s housekeeper and manages to stay sympathetic to all three parties in the love triangle.

Both Lawrence’s US and British publishers refused to publish it. Lawrence had a full version privately printed in Italy and distributed 2,000 copies. Wikipedia describes the fate of various expurgated and pirated editions. Burgess summarises Lawrence’s own account of printing a private edition, as given in ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.

The famous 1960 trial came about because Penguin decided to use the text as a test of the recent Obscene Publications Act 1959.

When the jury found against the prosecution i.e. that paperback publication could go ahead, Burgess and other critics like him were relieved because now they were free to discuss the book on its merits and admit the fact that it’s a flawed novel.

Official persecution continued. When he sent the manuscript of his poetry collection ‘Pansies’ to his London publisher, it was intercepted, opened, and alleged ‘obscenities’ cut.

In 1919 the Warren Gallery held an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings. A surprising 12,000 people paid to see them. They yellow press got wind of the nudity and egged on the police to raid the gallery and confiscate 14 of the pictures. The authorities proposed to destroy the paintings and the book of the exhibition though the gallery owners rounded up some contemporary artists to defend him.

Burgess doesn’t think much of the paintings, says the paintings ascribed to Mark Rampion, the character based on Lawrence in Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, are better.

Chapter 17. Death in Vence

Burgess dwells on the friendship between Aldous Huxley and Lawrence and he quotes a nice section from an interview given late in life where Huxley says that Lawrence was, above all, happy. Burgess thinks Huxley absorbed enough of the scientific worldview ‘to bring a new intellectual rigour to the novel’. Having just read a load of Huxley’s novels I think this is rubbish. There’s nothing intellectually rigorous about them, my abiding impression is of the endless vapouring gaseous trip about Love and Art gassed by preposterous pseudo-intellectual rentiers. And his later writings about drugs and religion dress up in scientific terminology but are basically spiritualist nonsense.

What comes over from Lawrence’s last months spent dying from tuberculosis was his own foolish denialism, and the complete wretched inadequacy of contemporary medicine. Only antibiotics can treat TB and they hadn’t been discovered/invented yet.

Testimony from various sources suggest that Frieda was worse than useless at looking after Lawrence. She couldn’t cook, turned the kitchen of the villa where he spent his last weeks into a slum. Everything had to be cleaned and tidied by Aldous and especially Maria Huxley who worshipped Lawrence like a god.

We have it on the testimony of Aldous Huxley that, a day or two before he died, Lawrence said of his wife: ‘Frieda, you have killed me.’ The best source for his final days is from the English poet Robert Nichol. He wrote:

Aldous would not repeat such a terrible saying unless he felt it to be true. And he said, ‘I like Frieda in many ways but she is incurably and incredibly stupid – the most maddening woman I think I ever came across. Nevertheless she was the only sort of woman with whom D.H.L. could live. (quoted p.196)

Burgess makes the point that if Lawrence had married little Maria Huxley, she would have been a faithful, efficient, kind wife, creating order and tidiness everywhere, as she did for Huxley – but Lawrence needed chaos. He thrived on the battle of wills, the clash between his domesticity and Frieda’s slovenliness, between his working class background and her aristocratic hauteur, between his English puritanism and her continental sensuality, on her willingness to fight back.

Mind you, these comments shed light on Frieda’s own memoirs, one of the most salient parts of which, for me, was the way she doesn’t actually comment on any of the numerous books he wrote during their 18-year marriage. I thought it was tact. Maybe she was just too stupid, and didn’t try.

He died peacefully in his sleep and was buried at Vence. A year later he was exhumed and shipped over to Taos where Fried built a shrine for him at the ranch.

Burgess calls him ‘the most English of our writers’, is that true? More English than Chaucer, Shakespeare or Dickens? He’s nearer the mark when he says:

The British expect comfort from their writers, and Lawrence offers very little. (p.197)

The tenor of the text and endings of most of his stories offer very little comfort, from the bleak endings of ‘Women in Love’ and ‘The Fox’, to the uncertain ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ or the hanging ending of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ – you go through these great emotional rollercoaster rides reading his stories but then, at the end… what?

Chapter 18. On The Side of Life

Burgess has a half-hearted go at speculating what might have happened if Lawrence had lived longer. Would he have come over to Huxley’s way of seeing i.e. combining all the blood and dark gods stuff with a more rational point of view? Unlikely.

Like most critics, Burgess thinks Lawrence had, in fact, done his best work. Some people think Sons and Lovers is his masterpiece; Burgess thinks it’s Women In Love. But after that it was all slowly downhill, there is a steady diminution in force, he is never so wildly radical again.

Then Burgess adds his own interpretation which is that Lawrence was a professional writer. He could sit down anywhere and bang out letters, stories, essays, poems or continue with a novel. More than most we have to take his oeuvre, across its many genres, as one thing.

Was he a prophet? Burgess acknowledges Lawrence’s writings about power, his dislike of Italian fascism, but his own flirting with power and submission in ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’. But he doesn’t mention what I think is stronger, which is the sense of doom which dogs Mellors in ‘Lady Chatterley’. Mellor’s conviction that a great crash was coming and the future was going to be very dark proved to be right.

Lawrence would have been dismayed to learn his name is associated in the common culture with sex, with the scandal surrounding Lady Chatterley, with the soft porn movie versions, as a prophet of soft-porn sensuality. There’s nothing soft porn about Lawrence: his writings are hard and rebarbative, they are not relaxing or lulling.

This is Burgess at his weakest. He wanders off into a lengthy consideration of Henry James and his criticism of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as he tries to define what ‘life’ means in the context of a novel. But he’s over-thinking it. Think back to reading ‘The Rainbow’: it is the most fantastic depiction of the complexity of human existence, of being a person plonked down amid families, in settlements and cultures, in the natural and man-made worlds, and the endless fizzing popping confusing experience of being alive to all these endless inputs and experiences. Comparisons with Henry James or James Joyce or any other writers are beside the point. Lawrence was the poet laureate of the teeming richness of Life and delves so deep, drilling beneath all conventional notions of identity, taking his characters to primeval, archetypal depths. And his novels inhabit the animals they describe and bring to life the myriads of flowers quite as fully as his human characters, maybe more so.

It seems overblown when Lawrence writes about the ‘cosmos’ but surely Lawrence, more than any other writer, had the right to do so, because he deliberately moved out of all his comfort zones, left England behind, and wrote dazzling evocations of the landscapes, flora and fauna of the Mediterranean, Australia, and the American and Mexican desert. Who cares what Henry James wrote about ‘form’ or why James Joyce deployed such complex symbolical structures – you only have to read any of Lawrence’s descriptions of the Australian outback, of the silver fish in the cold Pacific, of the thunderhead clouds massing over the distant mountains in Mexico, and you realise you are in the presence of a great, great writer, who owned and described more of the world than most of his contemporaries even saw.

Burgessian vocabulary

  • allumeuse = French for ‘tease’
  • hypergamy = the action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a superior sociological or educational background (as working class men do with upper class women, as Lawrence men do in a number of his stories: Virgin and Gypsy, Lady Chatterley)
  • prevernal = relating to the early stages of spring, or the end of winter

Credit

Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess was published by William Heinemann in 1985. Page references are to the 1986 Abacus paperback version.

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Posted by Simon on March 19, 2025

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The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence (1928)

A Penguin paperback edition of 12 short stories by D.H. Lawrence.

  • A Modern Lover (1910?)
  • Strike Pay (1913)
  • The Border-Line (1924)
  • Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)
  • The Last Laugh (1924)
  • Smile (1924)
  • The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)
  • Two Blue Birds (1926)
  • Glad Ghosts (1926)
  • In Love (1927)
  • None of That
  • Sun (1928)

The 1981 Penguin edition has a 4-page introduction written by Lawrence’s friend and critic, Richard Aldington. He gives dates of composition for the stories so I’ve rearranged them according to his chronology. Aldington’s introduction concludes with the point that:

Lawrence was quite aware that as a writer of short stories he was completely out of touch with the popular and high-paying magazines of the 1920s. Instead of trying to conform, he preferred to write newspaper articles for bread and butter, and to write his stories in his own way.

In Aldington’s view the stories fall into several groups. 1) The first two are pre-Great War, Edwardian. ‘Strike Pay’ is one of the belongs to the group of studies of West Midlands coal miners. 2) ‘A Modern Lover’ is the first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to in later stories, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man. 3) There are four gruesome and uncanny stores:

  • ‘Smile’ – Matthew travels to the death bed of his wife, Ophelia
  • ‘The Border Line’ – the ghost of a woman’s first husband, killed in the Great War, takes her from her second husband
  • ‘The Last Laugh’ – the demonic appearance of the god Pan in mid-winter London
  • ‘Glad Ghosts’ – the ghost of a spurned wife haunts the inhabitants of a country mansion

Aldington relates the uncanny stories to Lawrence being persuaded by his wife to return from their ranch in New Mexico to England in late 1923. He rediscovered his hatred for England and its superannuated class system but, during the trip, went to stay with an artist versed in the occult, Frederick Carter. Maybe this influenced these four supernatural stories, which are a strange eruption in Lawrence’s oeuvre.

A Modern Lover (1910?)

The first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man.

Young Cyril Mersham returns to the Midlands countryside where he grew up after two years away in the big city to the south. Some of the nature description is lovely but, even for Lawrence, it’s generally overwritten, overdone.

Surely, surely somebody could give him enough of the philtre of life to stop the craving which tortured him hither and thither, enough to satisfy for a while, to intoxicate him till he could laugh the crystalline laughter of the star, and bathe in the retreating flood of twilight like a naked boy in the surf, clasping the waves and beating them and answering their wild clawings with laughter sometimes, and sometimes gasps of pain.

Cyril arrives at the farm where he used to be such a frequent visitor three years ago, and is greeted by the farm wife, the father, the two sons who’ve just come back from a day at the coal mines and strip and wash, and the daughter of the house, Muriel. He is invited to stay for dinner but nowadays he talks in the received pronunciation of the South, careful and ironic statements, and the more he talks the more he alienates the entire family from him. He is not the local man he was. After eating he is out of the way in the busy kitchen with men walking backwards and forwards with hot water and whatnot, so Muriel tells him to go and wait in the parlour.

In the parlour Cyril sits in the old chair, observes the watercolour paintings of his on the wall and photos of him on the mantlepiece. In among them he notices a photo of a stranger he doesn’t know. He remembers all the books he and Muriel read and discussed, but it is all over-egged.

There, by that hearth, they had threshed the harvest of their youth’s experience, gradually burning the chaff of sentimentality and false romance that covered the real grain of life.

Cyril priggishly pontificates at her, who is all hesitancy. Their manner of speaking is quite hard to follow but what comes over is how supercilious and patronising he is. Then there’s the sound of a bicycle bell and a different male voice outside. She looks at Cyril and he instantly divines it is her new boyfriend. Muriel tells him that he told her to find someone else and, well… she has.

Sound of the interloper’s voice in the kitchen, talking easily to the brothers. Obviously he’s quite at home. Then a brother tells him Muriel’s in the parlour and he walks in to confront Cyril, the former lover.

He is Tom Vickers. He’s some kind of electrical engineer at the mine. He crushes Cyril’s hand in his handshake. But Cyril is unquenchably superior. Fencing and sizing each other up. In his internal monologue, Cyril cites literary authors to make himself feel superior and affects a lazy drawl. But he has lost.

Lawrence’s weakest area is sometimes his dialogue: it feels like he’s trying to be witty and sharp but this isn’t his metier so that this would-be witty dialogue feels weak and contrived; in trying to portray Cyril as witty and dazzling, it mostly comes over as clumsy and pretentious. I take the point that that is precisely the character of Cyril that he’s trying to portray. As with a lot of dialogue in old books, I wonder if this is actually how people spoke 100 years ago…

Lawrence is better at describing the curdling atmosphere of the scene and describing Mersham’s stealthy method of bringing up old songs and subjects with Muriel and so slowly stealing her sympathies back from the interloper.

They both leave at ten and walk the cobbled track to the barn where Vickers has parked his bike. In a way, the most memorable thing about the entire story is learning that in those days, a bicycle lamp wasn’t electrical but was an actual flame, in a lamp, with a wick, which had to be carefully lit and the glass clicked shut.

Cyril admires the other man’s confident movements, as when he leans down to pump up his tyres. He fools himself that this is the kind of man a wife gets bored of after a while, but has to admit he’s attractive. Cyril waves goodbye as Vickers cycles off.

He goes back into the parlour and asks Muriel if she’d like to walk him part of the way back to his path home. Her father looks disapproval but that doesn’t affect to young couple. Outside it is the dark night and, because he is more restrained, Lawrence is more effective.

There was a strangeness everywhere, as if all things had ventured out alive to play in the night, as they do in fairy-tales; the trees, the many stars, the dark spaces, and the mysterious waters below uniting in some magnificent game. They emerged from the wood on to the bare hillside. She came down from the wood-fence into his arms, and he kissed her, and they laughed low together. Then they went on across the wild meadows where there was no path.

They have reignited their old flame. He even says they could get married, although he has no money. He seems to suggest that she will ‘come to him again’, suggesting sex. As if they’d made love before. But doesn’t want to seem to be coaxing of forcing. but she points out how it (sex) is different for girls. Very unreasonably, he gets angry at her reluctance. He claims to have given her ‘books’ – presumably about contraceptive techniques?

When she points out how they’d have to creep about in corners, suddenly all the magic and glamour of it disappears, and he just feels tired, and a gap opens between them which she, of course senses, and begs him not to feel cross with her. Robbed of the possibility of sex, he finds himself deflated and empty. He hasn’t the energy to kiss her goodbye or say anything fancy. She turns and walks away without saying a word, her white face disappearing into the gloom.

How many billions of men must have felt this rebuff, the woman they’re wooing’s definitive refusal of sex, which bursts their balloon, evaporating all their energy or interest – and how many billions of women must have spoken sensibly and wisely and then been heart-broken when their man abruptly went cold and walked away. The story gets better as it progresses and the further it gets from Lawrence’s cack-handed dialogue. In one sense it’s a trite scenario, but the final walk through the night woods creates a mood which makes the ending genuinely moving.

Strike Pay (1913)

One of his studies of the West Midlands miners he grew up among. A lot of information is packed into just six pages. The miners are on strike. The Union agent hands out strike pay to a roomful of miners who are in a boisterous bantering mood, joking about how much they each get paid. They go into town and join the other colliers loitering around. then four of them decide to walk to Nottingham, nine miles away, to watch the Nottingham versus Aston Villa football match.

On the way they stop at each village pub for a round. They come to a field where some of the pit ponies they work with have been liberated from toiling underground (for the duration of the strike). The more adventurous of the miners round them up and mount and ride them, larking about, falling off, getting on again. Eventually they resume their trek to Nottingham. But at the next pub Ephraim Wharmby, a shy young lad, realises he’s lost his half-sovereign (a sovereign = one pound sterling, so half a sovereign was ten shillings or modern 50p). They all rifle through his clothes and boots and go back to the pony field but can’t find it. Being good chaps they all pitch in and give him two shillings each of their pay (10p) and he doesn’t have to buy the next round.

The match is good and the lads go on to more pubs, along with thousands of other colliers, but Ephraim is miserable and opts to go home. When he arrives home there is a scene with his domineering mother, Mrs Marriott, who asks where the devil he’s been, while they’ve made lunch, and tea and dinner for him, all to wait and then be cleared away. Sheepishly Ephraim hands over all he has (4 shillings sixpence, after ha paid for his football ticket) which makes Mrs Marriott angrily ask if he thinks that’s enough room and board to support him and his wife, Maud. Under the haranguing, Ephraim turns from meek and apologetic to furious, and demands his tea. Mrs Marriott order her daughter (Maud) to refuse and flounces out, but she quietly gets her man his tea, he is her man, after all.

The Border-Line (1924)

Katherine Farquhar is another avatar of Frieda Lawrence, a handsome full-bodied woman of forty, twice married with two grown-up children.

Daughter of a German Baron she was, and remained, in her own mind and body, although England had become her life-home. And surely she looked German, with her fresh complexion and her strong, full figure.

Full of confidence, she is in Paris boarding the train to take her to visit relatives in Baden-Baden and to see her second husband, Philip, a journalist currently working in Germany. She remembers her first husband, father of her two grown-up children, Alan Anstruther, son of a Scottish baronet, and captain in a Highland regiment. They fought. Alan was obstinate. After ten years they ceased to live together.

Alan had a good friend, Philip Farquar, trained for the bar, went into journalism, small and dark with an air of knowing all the secrets, attractive to women. Philip is in awe of Alan’s solidity. ‘He is the only real man, what I call a real man, that I have ever met.’

Then the Great War broke out and Alan marched bluffly off to war. In spring of 1915 he was reported missing and never reappeared. Katherine didn’t mourn. Philip stayed in England working as a journalist and was a source of consolation and strength. In 1921, aged 38, she married him.

It was lovely at first but then a sense of loss and degradation afflicted her. Philip is clever and reassures her but she feels trapped. Sometimes the face of Alan, ‘the bony, hard, masterful, but honest face of Alan would come back’ to her. She sensed him with her on the cross-Channel ferry and his memory made her happy in Paris, where the story opens.

So she takes the train East, heading into Germany, and:

As she looked unseeing out of the carriage window, suddenly, with a jolt, the wintry landscape realized itself in her consciousness. The flat, grey, wintry landscape, ploughed fields of greyish earth that looked as if they were compound of the clay of dead men. Pallid, stark, thin trees stood like wire beside straight, abstract roads. A ruined farm between a few more wire trees. And a dismal village filed past, with smashed houses like rotten teeth between the straight rows of the village street. With sudden horror she realized that she must be in the Marne country, the ghastly Marne country, century after century digging the corpses of frustrated men into its soil. The border country, where the Latin races and the Germanic neutralize one another into horrid ash. (p.94)

She is travelling across the borderline. The train arrives at Nancy. She has to change here and catch a different train on in the morning. A German porter escorts her to her hotel, where she has dinner. Then she fancies seeing the cathedral. She gets lost and has to ask a French policeman the way, for Alsace is now occupied by the French. She used to love seeing it but now she experiences the cathedral as a huge looming mass, and is terrified by the sense that behind it ‘lurks the great blood-creature waiting, implacable and eternal.’

As she turns to leave the square she sees a man waiting by the post office and realises it is her first husband, Alan. As she goes to pass, he puts his hand on her arm. He says nothing, doesn’t look at her.

She knew that she was walking with his spirit. But that even did not trouble her. It seemed natural. And there came over her again the feeling she had forgotten, the restful, thoughtless pleasure of a woman who moves in the aura of the man to whom she belongs.

She realises nothing comes close to the fulfilment of being with your man:

As she walked at his side through the conquered city, she realized that it was the one enduring thing a woman can have, the intangible soft flood of contentment that carries her along at the side of the man she is married to. It is her perfection and her highest attainment… No matter what the man does or is, as a person, if a woman can move at his side in this dim, full flood of contentment, she has the highest of him, and her scratching efforts at getting more than this, are her ignominious efforts at self-nullity. (p.97)

She knows he is a spirit returned from hell but all the fear and dread you might imagine someone having when encountering a ghost are absent. Instead Lawrence envisions the whole thing solely in terms of fulfilling a woman’s primal need.

Now that she was walking with a man who came from the halls of death, to her, for her relief. The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her, even now, was able to wipe out the ashy, nervous horror of the world from her body. She went at his side still and released, like one newly unbound, walking in the dimness of her own contentment.

And the word ‘contentment’ is repeated throughout the passage.

At the bridge-head he came to a standstill, and drew his hand from her arm. She knew he was going to leave her. But he looked at her from under his peaked cap, darkly but kindly, and he waved his hand with a slight, kindly gesture of farewell and of promise, as if in the farewell he promised never to leave her, never to let the kindliness go out in his heart, to let it stay hers always.

She goes back to her hotel and undresses for bed, trying not to break the spell of completion.

If a man could come back out of death to save her from this, she would not ask questions of him, but be humble, and beyond tears grateful.

Next morning she goes out into the defeated and occupied town but it is hard and cold. So she catches the connecting train on into Germany proper. She crosses the Rhine, huge, sluggish and weary of race struggle. It is a profound geographical borderline between the Celtic and Germanic races. At the actual border, at Kehl, she feels that ‘the two races neutralized one another, and no polarity was felt, no life–no principle dominated.’ Lawrence gives brilliant descriptions of the watery, frozen landscape. After another long delay:

At last they set off, northwards, free for the moment, in Germany. It was the land beyond the Rhine, Germany of the pine forests. The very earth seemed strong and unsubdued, bristling with a few reeds and bushes, like savage hair. There was the same silence, and waiting, and the old barbaric undertone of the white-skinned north, under the waning civilization. The audible overtone of our civilization seemed to be wearing thin, the old, low, pine-forest hum and roar of the ancient north seemed to be sounding through. At least, in Katherine’s inner ear. (p.101)

At last the train arrives at Oos and her husband, Philip, is there to meet her. He is obviously ill and complains of being cold. And she, after her transformative experience at Nancy, the deep sense of completion she felt with the ghost of her first husband, finds Philip trivial.

As she looked at him she felt for the first time, with curious clarity, that it was humiliating to be married to him, even in name. She was humiliated even by the fact that her name was Katherine Farquhar. Yet she used to think it a nice name! ‘
Just think of me married to that little man!’ she thought to herself. ‘Think of my having his name!’
It didn’t fit. She thought of her own name: Katherine von Todtnau; or of her married name: Katherine Anstruther. The first seemed most fitting. But the second was her second nature. The third, Katherine Farquhar, wasn’t her at all. (p.101)

Also waiting there is her sister, Marianne, and they immediately gang up on Philip, denigrating him in German and bursting into giggle.

Both sisters stood still and laughed in the middle of the street. ‘The little one’ was Philip.
‘The other was more a man,’ said Marianne. ‘But I’m sure this one is easier. The little one! Yes, he should be easier,’ and she laughed in her mocking way.
‘The stand-up-mannikin!’ said Katherine, referring to those little toy men weighted at the base with lead, that always stand up again.
‘Yes! Yes!’ cried Marianne. ‘I’m sure he always comes up again! Prumm!’ She made a gesture of knocking him over. ‘And there he rises once more!’ She slowly raised her hand, as if the mannikin were elevating himself.
The two sisters stood in the street laughing consumedly. (p.102)

Which I’m sure Philip, feeling cold and ill, thoroughly appreciated. So they settle in, tea, dinner, chats. Marianne is five years older than Katherine. Her husband also was killed in the war but she has reached a place of equanimity and detachment.

She had now ceased to struggle for anything at all. She was a woman who had lived her life. So at last, life seemed endlessly quaint and amusing to her. She accepted everything, wondering over the powerful primitiveness of it all, at the root-pulse. ‘I don’t care any more at all what people do or don’t do,’ she said. ‘Life is a great big tree, and the dead leaves fall. But very wonderful is the pulse in the roots! So strong, and so pitiless.’
It was as if she found a final relief in the radical pitilessness of the Tree of Life.

This comes close to my view, or is the standpoint I would like to arrive at. Philip plays up to being weak and ill. To some extent it had always been his schtick, his brand. From his point of view, he saw the strong, manly, defiant types be exterminated by the million in the war while he kept his head down, and so he survived and won Katherine’s hand. ‘When the lion is shot, the dog gets the spoil.’

From Katherine’s point of view his weakness and dependency made a welcome change after Alan’s manly expectation of being obeyed and worshipped. But here, in defeated abject Germany, Philip comes over as abject and defeated and she realises she despises him, ‘the whimpering little beast’.

Katherine sees the abject poverty of the townspeople. In the evening they queue to get water from a hot spring since so many of them can’t afford coal or wood to warm their homes and she despises Philip for his self-pitying shivering. Let him shiver!

She goes for big bracing walks in the wild woods, deep in snow and feels the presence of her manly first husband, she wants to hug the big firm pine trees. But Philip staggers along beside her, short and sick and whining. God, how she despises him! Over there, in the reddish rocks, she is sure Alan is waiting for her but… She has to turn and take the panting Philip back to his sick bed.

Philip becomes so ill he is bed-ridden but Katherine continues her long walks in the woods. One day Alan simply walks out from among the rocks, striding proudly in his kilt, and puts his arm round her, and leads her to a secluded place, and makes love to her.

She yielded in a complete yielding she had never known before. And among the rocks he made love to her, and took her in the silent passion of a husband, took a complete possession of her. (p.104)

Obviously the word ‘possession’ has a double meaning, in the contexts of ghosts and spirits. I suppose it raises the question of whether Alan’s appearances to Katherine are ‘real’ or her hallucinations.

On her return she finds Philip really ill. She doesn’t care but out of duty stays with him and tends him. Next day she can feel Alan waiting among the rocks but Philip becomes hysterical at the thought of him leaving her and so she stays, sullen and resentful. As evening approaches it grows colder and colder and:

A very powerful flow seemed to envelop her in another reality. (p.105)

Alan is calling her, Alan has hold of her soul which a force which grows by the hour. She stays with Philip who goes downhill fast, at midnight rolling his eyes, and he begs her to hold him in his arms ‘in pure terror of death’.

And as she reluctantly works her arm down around his shoulders, on the bed, the door opens and Alan walks silently in. He walks to the bed and loosens the sick man’s arms from around Katherine’s neck and places his (Philip’s) hands on his chest. And Philip has last convulsions and dies.

But Alan ignores all that and draws her over to the other bed, where he makes love to her again:

But Alan drew her away, drew her to the other bed, in the silent passion of a husband come back from a very long journey. (p.105)

Commentary

Obviously a story like this drives a coach and horses through our modern notions of feminism and gender. Lawrence’s obsession with the notion of Man and Woman, and Husband and Wife, and the primeval power they exercise over each other, seem like they’re from the stone age. Certainly the story’s notion that a woman must submit to a strong manly husband would make any feminist throw up.

In my opinion, the best thing to do with this, as with most old literature, is to suspend judgement and give yourself to the experience, submit to the text’s descriptions, ‘ideas’, obsessions and opinions, no matter how contrary to modern belief.

There’s something to outrage a feminist or progressive reader on every page, yet it would be odd to balk at these ancient attitudes but swallow whole the bigger issue here, the idea that there are ghosts, there are spirits, that ghosts of the dead come back to visit us.

In fact this itself is contested within the story. an see that this is contested. The fundamental question is, Is the ghost of Alan real or Katherine’s (very powerful) hallucination and my opinion is, It doesn’t matter. The text is what it is.

If, for the duration of the story, you buy into the (obviously nonsensical) idea that the spirits of the dead come back to haunt us, why not buy into all the story’s other nonsensical or objectionable aspects and opinions?

Reading any literature is, in an obvious sense, submitting to someone else’s worldview for a while. What’s the point of doing it if that worldview isn’t different from ours, uncanny, alien, other, enlightening, illuminating and takes us to strange places, showing us actions and opinions we wouldn’t countenance for a second in our real lives? And so judging it by the value of our real lives is a problematic, arguably a blinkered and self-censoring, approach.

On this view, the more a text breaches modern morality, or vividly depicts old opinions, different worldviews, the better, as this exercises the muscles of the imagination and helps keep our minds open, open to the millions of things human beings have believed and valued.

Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)

Jimmy plunged out into the gulfing blackness of the Northern night, feeling how horrible it was, but pressing his hat on his brow in a sense of strong adventure. He was going through with it.

A satire on the type of the squirming Oxford intellectual, a type Lawrence detested.

Jimmy Frith is 35. He’s just been divorced by his ‘very charming and clever wife’ of ten years, Clarissa. Jimmy is the editor of a high-class, rather high-brow, rather successful magazine, the Commentator, and his candid editorials bring him shoals of admiring acquaintances. Plus he’s handsome. The result? He meets loads of clever, sophisticated women when what he wants is to meet the ‘real’ people, the simple, genuine, direct spontaneous, unspoilt souls. In the opinion of his men friends, he was a grinning faun or Pan-person. In his own opinion, he was a martyred Saint Sebastian with the mind of Plato. He sought some unspoilt, unsophisticated, wild-blooded woman, to whom he would be a sort of Solomon of wisdom, beauty and wealth. She would need to be in reduced circumstances to appreciate his wealth, which amounted to the noble sum of three thousand pounds and a little week-ending cottage in Hampshire.

Then his magazine is sent a short vivid poem and accompanying letter from a woman in the North. He asks for another and a correspondence ensues. To his enquiries she explains that she is married to a coal miner who has a mistress, so is alone and misunderstood. She used to be a teacher. Now she writes poetry to relieve her heart. She is Mrs Emilia Pinnegar, 31, with a child of 8.

All these facts are by way of setting the scene for the meat of the story. This is that, after some correspondence, Jimmy decides to go and visit this woman. So he takes a train to Yorkshire, then undertakes a harrowing walk through a coal-mining town as dusk falls, eventually arriving at her poor cottage where she answers to his knock.

Mrs Pinnegar is not a pretty woman. She is tall, with a long face and a haggard defiant expression. Life has been hard to her. In his semi-realistic, semi-visionary style, Lawrence depicts Jimmy overcoming all the drawbacks, in his own internal thoughts, and then rashly inviting her to run away, to come and live with him in his house in St John’s Wood. Lawrence depicts the strange and visionary in the everyday.

He lifted his face, his eyes still cast in that inturned, blind look. He looked now like a Mephistopheles who has gone blind. With his black brows cocked up, Mephistopheles, Mephistopheles blind and begging in the street.

She is astonished by this mad invitation but he insists and she begins to accept it. She suggests he waits around to meet the man of the house, which he reluctantly accepts. The husband is on the afternoon shift at the mine and arrives home soon after 9pm, dirty and reeking of underground

Maybe that’s what all the fol-de-rol of the plot was for: to arrive at this confrontation between the bookish Oxford intellectual and the dirty but proud coalminer. He strips to the waist and washes himself, then his wife washes his back, then towels him dry. They both perform this daily ritual completely ignoring Jimmy who sits in a corner, noting the husband’s thin muscular physique.

Then the wife brings his dinner and Pinnegar sits and eats, at a right angle to Jimmy. He asks why Jimmy’s here and so begins a long, tense dialogue, which includes the blunt admission:

‘She’s told you I’ve got another woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’ll tell you for why. If I give in to the coal face, and go down the mine every day to eight hours’ slavery, more or less, somebody’s got to give in to me.’ (p.122)

The husband and wife argue over his other woman, but when she says she wants to go with Jimmy, he visibly strips himself of all emotion, and agrees. It’s late. Jimmy leaves to take up the reluctant offer of the local pub, to sleep on their sofa.

Next morning, he returns to the cottage. In the daylight he sees how bad the woman’s skin is and bluntly thinks, ‘however am I going to sleep with that woman?’ but determines that he will. The husband is there, in a corner, reading the paper. He asks her to come with him now, but she refuses, saying she has things to sort out, she’ll come on Monday. Now she goes out with the child, leaving Jimmy alone with the surly husband.

They talk frankly, about the new government (‘something has to change’) and then the woman. The miner says something had to change and he regards Jimmy as the instrument of that change. Jimmy knows the cold, hard miner is dominating him and hates it.

On the train home, Jimmy at first feels exultant, like he’s had a great adventure. Back in London he goes to see his friend, Severn, who thinks he’s been an idiot. This prompts Jimmy to write a last-minute letter on Sunday night asking Emily to reconsider: does she really want to come (which, of course, signals his own reluctance)?

But the only reply is confirmation she’ll be taking the train next morning. Next morning Jimmy goes to Marylebone station taut with nerves. In the cab to his house he can more than sense the presence of the other man on her, he can feel him. It will be a battle. So the story ends:

As he sat in the taxi, a perverse but intense desire for her came over him, making him almost helpless. He could feel, so strongly, the presence of that other man about her, and this went to his head like neat spirits. That other man! In some subtle, inexplicable way, he was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him. And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whisky. Which of the two would fall before him with a greater fall–the woman, or the man, her husband? (p.130)

On a rational level, it is wildly improbable and doesn’t make any sense. But on the irrational, unconscious level Lawrence operates on, it is magnificent.

Two Blue Birds (1926)

This is a very high-spirited, amused, ironic story. A man and woman, in their thirties, are married and love each other but for the past four years or so can’t bear to be in each other’s company. So they live apart, he in London, she in the south of France with her latest lover. He has a secretary, Miss Wrexall, who adores him, would do anything for him. The wife thinks the arrangement is fine, she suggested she go to France, she’s the one having the ‘gallant little affairs’ but the thought of his dutiful and common little secretary is like grit in her eye.

Then he has his secretary’s mother and sister move in. They’re of the servant class: the mother is an excellent cook and the sister functions as a maid and valet de chambre. When the wife comes back from France she is horrified at how well the new household functions, and himself cock of the walk.

He had that air of easy aplomb and good humour which is so becoming to a man, and which he only acquires when he is cock of his own little walk, made much of by his own hens.

The servants are all flattery and submission and what would you like for dinner, Mrs Gee, but she hates them.

Spring visit

So on her next visit she needles him. Maybe being so well provided for might be bad for his work (for he is a workaholic)? But the narrative hovers at a generalised level, about their feelings, especially her conflicted feelings: loving him but not wanting to be with him; having affairs but not caring about the other men; hating the happy little domestic situation he’s arranged for himself.

She is Mrs Gee, ‘a broad, strong woman’ just turned 40. She schemes. Her hardness is brilliantly conveyed.

The garden was full of flowers: he loved them for their theatrical display. Lilac and snowball bushes, and laburnum and red may, tulips and anemones and coloured daisies. Lots of flowers! Borders of forget-me-nots! Bachelor’s buttons! What absurd names flowers had! She would have called them blue dots and yellow blobs and white frills. Not so much sentiment after all! There is a certain nonsense, something showy and stagey about spring, with its pushing leaves and chorus-girl flowers, unless you have something corresponding inside you. Which she hadn’t. (p.19)

This is the funniest Lawrence text I’ve read. Laugh-out-loud funny. The wife comes across him dictating an article to the secretary in the garden and is infuriated: is there nowhere to escape their happy little domesticity?

He was dictating a magazine article about the modern novel. ‘What the modern novel lacks is architecture.’ Good God! Architecture! He might just as well say: What the modern novel lacks is whalebone, or a teaspoon, or a tooth stopped. (p.19)

It is an article on ‘The Future of The Novel’, precisely the kind of thing Virginia Woolf wrote by the dozen but here, taken as the epitome of fatuousness.

The wife spies on the man complacently dictating to the compliant secretary when she notices two blue tits fighting at his feet. He notices, too, and waves them away, then the wife steps forward and there’s a tense scene, with the wife making ironic catty remarks to the secretary. Then stalks off, in her rather wolfish way.

Tea time arrives and the wife reappears as the sister serves the tea things. She asks the secretary (who was about to leave) to stay, and tell her sister (the maid) to bring another cup. Miss Wrexall runs off to change (for tea) into a chicory blue dress of the same shade as Mrs Gee’s except the latter’s is very expensive and fine. Two birds in blue fighting over their man. Like the two blue tits. And the two birds of the title. Humans becoming, and behaving like, animals, as in the novella The Fox.

Mrs Gee taunts them both, suggesting Miss Wrexall is not just the most perfect secretary but that maybe she writes the husband’s novels for him? Mrs Gee taunts the secretary for being so competent and proficient at shorthand and so on. The husband bridles. Miss Wrexall becomes agitated.

Sticking the knife in, Mrs Gee tells Cameron (the first time we’ve heard his name) that maybe he takes too much from Miss Wrexall. Her aim is to stain and sully their simple working relationship. Miss Wrexall bridles and says there is nothing inappropriate between them. Trying to reconcile, Miss Wrexall says there’s no need for Mrs Gee to feel left out.

‘Thank you, my dear, for your offer,’ said the wife, rising, ‘but I’m afraid no man can expect two blue birds of happiness to flutter round his feet, tearing out their little feathers!’ (p.26)

And with that parting shot she gets up and leaves. And that’s it. It’s an absolutely brilliant depiction of its subject matter, of the very complicated currents involved in marriage, separation, relationships, all tied up with the simple metaphor of the two birds.

The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)

The unnamed young American woman who’s the protagonist, a Californian girl from Berkeley, at 23 marries a little, wiry, twisted fellow from Holland, who’s made his fortune setting up and running silver mines in northern Mexico, in Chihuahua state.

It’s a bleak isolated location. Ten years pass. She bears him two children. The Great War knocks the bottom out of the silver market and the mines are abandoned while the Dutchman tries to switch to agriculture. They have occasional white guests (i.e. non Spanish or Mexican). One of these asks what lies beyond the hills that surround the ranch and the Dutchman explains about the neighbouring Indians: about the wandering tribes, resembling the Navajo, who were still wandering free, and the Yaquis of Sonora, and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua State.

This conversation lights a flame in the woman’s soul. Her husband goes away for a few days to Torreon so the woman gets her servants to saddle up a horse, packs some food and – rejecting offers to help or accompany her – sets off for the hills.

To cut a longish story short, after a while she bumps into three Indians. When she tells them she has rejected the white man’s God and wants to find out more about their gods, they nod to each other: this was prophesied; the white man has triumphed over the Indian because the sun and the moon are out of balance, but the wise men predict that when a white woman offers herself as a sacrifice, then the sun and the moon will be realigned.

So she agrees to travel back to their village where she is put up in a house without windows and, over the course of weeks and maybe months, we see her being subjected to various rituals, stripped and anointed, redressed in native costume, allowed to watch native dances and ceremonies, and above all, plied with a sweet drink which gives her hallucinations, makes her forget herself and instead see phantasmagorias and become acutely sensitive to sights and sounds.

Lawrence prepares us for the ending by having her think, repeatedly, ‘I have died, my old self is dead, I have died to my old life etc’. So she is perfectly prepared when the shortest day of midwinter arrives, and the Indians ritually strip, wash, anoint, redress her and lead her up to a sacred cave behind an imposing sheet of ice and there, as the sun moves slowly round to shine through the ice and illuminate the cave, they sacrifice her to their gods.

The actual act isn’t described. The story stops just at the moment before she is sacrificed, with a great sense of suspense.

They were anxious, terribly anxious, and fierce. Their ferocity wanted something, and they were waiting the moment. And their ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph. But still they were anxious.

Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious. Black, and fixed, and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond the sun. And in their black, empty concentration there was power, power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionlessness he watched till the red sun should send his ray through the column of ice. Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power.

The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race. (p.81)

In Lawrence’s later novels I noticed his frequent use of words he’s coined and ‘exultance’ is one of them. Standard English isn’t deep or vivid enough to convey the depth he wants to express.

The Last Laugh (1925)

E.M. Forster wrote stories about Pan, the mischievous Greek god of nature, associated with spring, fertility, merriment and sex but they were set in sunny Greece or a summer’s day in the English countryside. Lawrence has the bright idea of relocating all this to Hampstead, in north London, in the depths of winter.

So it’s a cold winter’s night when a slight man with a red beard says goodbye to two friends, a man and a woman, who are visiting, shuts his door and they go down into the street. When the woman calls goodbye Lorenzo’, we know this is a brief, sly self-portrait of Lawrence himself.

On into the snowy street go the man in his bowler hat and the young woman. She is Miss James (referred to simply as ‘James’) and is deaf. We learn this when the man says he can hear someone laughing. This prompts James to get out her listening machine, an elaborate device which needs to be switched on, and puts on her headphones. She can’t hear any laughter but then thinks she sees something in a little park with big black holly trees and old, ribbed, silent English elms, ‘a dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes.’

They’re loud talking brings over a tall, clean-shaven young policeman. None of them can hear the laughter but they all feel… rejuvenated, enlivened. The girl finds herself attracted to the fit young policeman and starts to feel frisky:

She seemed to stretch herself, to stretch her limbs free. And the inert look had left her full soft cheeks. Her cheeks were alive with the glimmer of pride and a new dangerous surety… The second of ancient fear was followed at once in her by a blithe, unaccustomed sense of power.

This is something new for the girl:

Having held herself all her life intensely aloof from physical contact, and never having let any man touch her, she now, with a certain nymph-like voluptuousness, allowed the large hand of the young policeman to support her

Meanwhile the man in the bowler hat:

His voice, with curious delight, broke into a laugh again, as he stood and stamped his feet on the snow, and danced to his own laughter, ducking his head.

He thinks he sees something moving and sets off at a run down the hill. He comes to a halt in front of a house just as the front door opens and a woman comes down the path. She asks if he just knocked at her door and he says no. Mysteriously, magically, seductively, she says she’s always listening for that knock at the front door because you always hope… you always hope something wonderful will happen. She makes eyes at him and invites him in and he needs no second invitation. For some reason Lawrence makes her a Jewess. Maybe that is to emphasise her exotic, slightly unenglish sexiness. Into her house disappears the man with the bowler hat.

James and the policeman watch then turn away and walk towards the tube station. She feels a tremendous sense of exultation and power, so much so that she feels she could kill the policeman.

She was surprised herself at the strong, bright, throbbing sensation beneath her breasts, a sensation of triumph and rosy anger. Her hands felt keen on her wrists. She who had always declared she had not a muscle in her body! Even now, it was not muscle, it was a sort of flame. (p.139)

And then, making it absolutely plain that this is about the god:

Voices were calling. In spite of her deafness she could hear someone, several voices, calling and whistling, as if many people were hallooing through the air: ‘He’s come back! Aha! He’s come back!’ (p.139)

There’s a flash of lightning and she sees the face right in front of her. She and the policeman walk on towards her house, which is a little one in side street near a church but as they approach the church she sees the front door is open. From inside come more voices crying ‘He is back’, then piece of paper are whirled past them on the wind and then the big white sheet of the altar cloth. In case the reader hasn’t got it yet, Lawrence writes:

There came a bit of gay, trilling music. The wind was running over the organ-pipes like pan-pipes, quickly up and down. Snatches of wild, gay, trilling music, and bursts of the naked low laughter. (p.141)

The policeman is so scared by all this that he asks if he can come into her house to warm himself up. She says OK and he can make a fire in the grate but he mustn’t come upstairs, which is where she goes.

Cut to the next morning, and James in her studio looking at her paintings. She finds them ludicrous. The servant comes to ask if she wants breakfast and is surprised when James says there’s no need to shout i.e. she can hear. In fact everything feels different the morning after.

The air all seemed rare and different. Suddenly the world had become quite different: as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, mouldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shrivelled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven. (p.142)

The serving woman reminds her that there’s a man downstairs, the policeman. James is surprised that he didn’t let himself out the night before.

Now she thinks of Marchbanks. This is a young man she’s been jolly good friends with for two years. Not lovers, mind; none of that dirty stuff. Now, in her new world eyes, she thinks how ridiculous it is, all this man-woman nonsense and, to her surprise, she hears the low laughter, as if agreeing with her.

Only now is it made explicit that this Marchbanks is the man in the bowler hat she was with last night. Now she sees him coming down the side street to the house then entering. It’s their habit for him to come to breakfast. He asks him about staying his night with the Jewess. He left at dawn. She tells him not to shout when he speaks and he thinks she’s joking, doesn’t realise she can hear. She is, in fact, cured.

James now has the confidence to mock Marchbanks who doesn’t like it. She tells him she saw the face again, closer up, last night, and heard the laughter, but can’t tell him any more.

They go down to see the policeman and the story for the first time topples over into being a ghost story. The policeman hasn’t left because he has gone lame. James asks him to take his socks off and they discover that his foot has become deformed, curled itself up like the paws of an animal. Of course. He has started turning into a satyr. In her ear James hears the creepy laughter and then Marchbanks reels back as if he’s been shots.

She started round again as Marchbanks gave a strange, yelping cry, like a shot animal. His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony but partly wild recognition. He was staring with fixed eyes at something. And in the rolling agony of his eyes was the horrible grin of a man who realises he had made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself.

‘Why,’ he yelped in a high voice, ‘I knew it was he!’ And with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor. Then he lay still, in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightening. (p.146)

And the story ends abruptly with ‘faint smell of almond blossom in the air.’

This is a horror story, isn’t it? not a genre you associate with Lawrence.

Aldington suggests that Lawrence’s placing of himself at the start of the story somehow implies that he is a wizard capable of deploying the occult powers that follow. This includes deforming ‘his natural enemy’, the policeman (to understand this you need to know about the terrible persecution Lawrence suffered from the authorities and the police during the First World War; see the novel Kangaroo) and striking dead a personal enemy.

Smile (1926)

A very short story, 5 pages. The third-person narrator describes a man on a train south. He’s had a telegram announcing that a woman he is attached to somehow, Ophelia, is critically ill. She is in a hospice run by the Blue Sisters, in Italy. Unable to stay up all night at her bedside, he sits up all night on the sleeper train from France into Italy, as penance. He has a Christian frame of mind, in fact:

His dark, handsome, clean-shaven face would have done for Christ on the Cross, with the thick black eyebrows tilted in the dazed agony.

But by the time he gets to the hospice, the following evening, the Mother Superior tells him Ophelia is dead. She leans towards him sympathetically, but he recoils. When she places a hand on his arm he notices how shapely it is. When she stands he sees how full-bodied she is. She calls for a young nun to come and accompany him to see the body and he notices how shapely her hand is, too. So he’s taken to see the body. In the room is another nun. When she stands he notices her fine white hand against her bosom. Obviously he is super-aware of their femininity.

When Matthew (only now are we told his name) sees the body (we are only now told it is his wife), gives a grunt and then smiles. The three women (Mother Superior, a senior nun, the junior nun) are scandalised but smiles are infectious and one by one, they smile too.

The smile fades and he looks back over his marriage. Ten years during which she became restive and left him numerous times, only to crawl back. There are no children. The whole thing was a disaster. he’s filled with bottomless sadness.

Inexplicably he feels the dead woman digging him in the ribs, tempting him to laugh. To quell it he turns to the Mother Superior and snarks ‘Mea culpa’. The nuns step back from this strange angry man. But even as he makes for the door he has to hold back the smile and, as he passes her, is smitten by voluptuous feelings for the mature nun.

When he’s left the three sisters move closer, bend over the body and notice, they think, the ghost of a smile on the dead woman’s face. Did she see him? Did she catch the smile that infected them all?

Glad Ghosts (1926)

Long, 40 pages. It was the first fictional work he began after what proved to be his final trip to Europe, in the autumn 1925.

It’s a surprisingly accessible, chatty first-person narrator tells this long ghost story. It’s all about his friendship with the Honourable Carlotta Fell. They met when they were both at school together. She was attracted to him because he had a real feel for the thing, for It, but they were never lovers, never anything like. She affected to hate her own class but like all posh young people, got over it and married into it, to a Lord Lathkill, very handsome, officer in a Guards regiment. He sees them soon after they’re engaged when Lathkill jokes about ‘the Lathkill bad luck’.

They see each other now and then but then the war comes. Afterwards, he sees them again, learns that Lathkill was wounded in the throat, now his voice is husky. They have twins. The narrator visits and sees them asleep in their cots. How sweet. Then a little girl.

He travels. Then he hears about the disasters. The twins were killed in a car crash along with their aunt. A few months later the little girl dies of an illness. He’s abroad when he gets the news and toys with writing, but what could he say? Some time later he returns to England and sends a letter. Carlotta replies inviting him to their place in Derbyshire. He counter-replies asking to see her in London. Here he sees for himself the lines of suffering in her face, and how the stuffing’s been knocked out of her.

She really presses him to visit them in Derbyshire so he acquiesces. Lathkill meets him at the station and drives him to their dark, lifeless mansion. Here things kick up a notch. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name, Mark Morier (distantly echoing the Paul Morel of Sons and Lovers).

More to the point, we learn two key facts: this house has a ghost, a woman ghost, who is meant to bring good luck (unlike the bad luck which has so far blighted the couple) but this ghost is rarely if ever seen. And 2) that Lathkill’s elderly mother holds seances and that in one of these the medium unambiguously stated that the Lathkill ghost would return as and when a friend of theirs with two Ms returned. Lathkill and Carlotta both think ‘Mark Morier’.

That evening he attends an awesomely frigid and stony dinner: Carlotta and Lathkill, along with his witchy mother, and two other guests: a yellow liverish colonel, and his terrified silent wife, Mrs Hale. The stoniness of the dinner is magnificently conveyed.

Then the women retired and the men go to the drawing room to smoke and drink spirits. Here the terrified Colonel tells his story. He married young, a woman named Lucy who was 28 to his 20. She bore him three children who grew up and married, but then she died. And then she reappeared to him after death. She badgered him to remarry and even suggested the bride, one of their daughters’ friends, 28, the same age Lucy was. And yet after the second marriage, she has haunted him angrily denouncing him for betraying her, terrifying him away from sleeping with the new Mrs Hale. Hence the extraordinary frigidity of the couple at dinner time, the fear and sterility in Mrs Hale.

Then they go up to join the women for coffee and more stilted conversation. In the midst of it, the man suggest putting some records on and dancing, so they clear the furniture out of the way and there’s an extended description of the dance, of the narrator’s feelings of dancing with old Carlotta, and then with terrified Mrs Hale.

In the midst of the dancing they feel the room become very cold. Presumably it is the ghost. The Colonel had gone to bed but now he reappears in his pyjamas, saying the ghost of Lucy has reappeared to admonish him. This triggers a diatribe from Lathkill. He explains that he realises he has been living bloodlessly, like a ghost, he and Carlotta are both ghosts, the house is dead and sterile. But this evening he has realised they have to live while they are still alive.

He sits next to Mrs Hale and presses her hand to his breast. And he tells the Colonel that the only way to appease the spirit of Lucy is to take her to his heart and warm her. Did they have much sex when they were married? No, the Colonel admits; he didn’t think she wanted it and so had affairs with other women but left her alone. Now Lathkill, in his raised visionary state, tells him to open his chest to her, and the Colonel indeed undoes his dressing gown, unbuttons his pyjamas and exposes his chest. He delivers an astonishing paean to his mother, thanking her for creating him, a man of flesh and blood.

If this was a ghost story, a genre story, we’d meet the ghost. But it isn’t, it’s Lawrence delivering a sermon. The sermon is, unsurprisingly, about the importance of physical love i.e. sex but delivered by Lathkill, who’s gone into visionary overdrive:

We’ve almost become two ghosts to one another, wrestling. Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can’t give it to you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We’ve suffered so much the other way. And the children, it is as well they are dead. They were born of our will and our disembodiment. Oh, I feel like the Bible. Clothe me with flesh again, and wrap my bones with sinew, and let the fountain of blood cover me. (p.192)

The women react to these speeches in the same bizarre spirit, Carlotta bursting into tears, Mrs Hale sticking by Lathkill.

Eventually this bizarre and surreal scene comes to an end and Lathkill walks the narrator to his guest room. Here he strips and imagines stiff unhappy Carlotta stripping down the hall and fantasises about worshipping her with his body. Instead he remains chaste. Then he goes to sleep and has a visionary dream, a long fantasia which involves meeting the ghost in the heart of oblivion. Here’s what he dreams.

Women were not unknown to me. But never before had woman come, in the depths of night, to answer my deep with her deep. As the ghost came, came as a ghost of silence, still in the depth of sleep. I know she came. I know she came even as a woman, to my man. But the knowledge is darkly naked as the event. I only know, it was so. In the deep of sleep a call was called from the deeps of me, and answered in the deeps, by a woman among women. Breasts or thighs or face. I remember not a touch, no, nor a movement of my own. It is all complete in the profundity of darkness. (p.201)

There is no embarrassing next morning, he just gets up and leaves, Lathklill shaking his hand, Carlotta saying ‘At last it was perfect!’

What this means is made clear in the last page of the story, which consists of a letter Lathkill writes some time later to the narrator who is once again abroad. In the letter Lathkill announces that Carlotta has had a baby, with yellow hair, while just a few days later, Mrs Hale had a baby with black hair.

So what I think ‘happened’ is that the evening ended with Lathkill impregnating Mrs Hale and the narrator impregnating Carlotta. The three alienated and sterile people (Lathkill, Carlotta, Mrs H) were all rejuvenated and brought back to life, in real flesh-and-blood bodies. Colonel Hale was exorcised of his guilt and has gone off to farm pigs. Even spooky Lady Lathkill has, apparently, abandoned the other side and committed to ‘this side’, to life in the here and now. With the result that the dead house where the narrator noticed everyone spoke in hushed whispers, has been restored to life. And Lathkill loves his life and his home again.

Sex is the cure.

According to notes, Lawrence really struggled with this story, starting and finishing others while he wrestled with it and you can see why. Like so many of his works it falls into two halves: the opening is amazingly fresh and realistic, sounding like a normal writer, and even up to the frigid dinner party it makes sense. It’s when the Colonel confesses how he is haunted by the ghost of his first wife that the story crosses over to the other side of fantasy. The sudden cooling of the room as if a spirit had entered, the increasingly frenetic dancing, the men swapping their dancing partners as they are to swap sexual partners, and Lathkill’s visionary speeches to the Colonel, Carlotta and his mother, before plunging into the strange ending where the narrator appears to have sex in a dream. Or is he just repressing the reality of sleeping with another man’s wife? I prefer the dream opinion because that’s what Lawrence presents in his text, that’s what’s on the page, and that is what is such a weird and giddy escape from the banal world of adultery.

Social history note: Here as in other stories from the period, Lawrence talks about them putting some jazz on the gramophone. Imagine how evocative it would be if he only told us the precise track.

In Love (1927)

12 pages. A light comedy.

Two sisters: Henrietta and Hester. Hester, the eldest, 25, is due to get married in just a month’s time. Henrietta, the younger, is just 21. Hester looks worried about going to spend a weekend with her fiancé, Joe, on his farm in Wiltshire but she goes anyway.

Here she spends the day helping with the chores, helping the cook serve dinner etc, then the servants wash up an leave. Six months earlier Hester would have been comfortable with Joe, they’ve been friends for donkey’s years. But now there’s a constraint between themselves because he’s made the mistake of falling in love with her. He wants to cuddle and ‘pet’ and all that stuff, which she finds repellent. Wishes it had never happened, now. For some reason I’ve found more humour in this selection of Lawrence stories than in all his novels put together.

He was extremely competent at motor-cars and farming and all that sort of thing. And surely she, Hester, was as complicated as a motorcar! Surely she had as many subtle little valves and magnetos and accelerators and all the rest of it, to her make-up! If only he would try to handle her as carefully as he handled his car! She needed starting, as badly as ever any automobile did. Even if a car had a self-starter, the man had to give it the right twist. Hester felt she would need a lot of cranking up, if ever she was to start off on the matrimonial road with Joe. And he, the fool, just sat in a motionless car and pretended he was making heaven knows how many miles an hour. (p.151)

After enduring some ‘cuddling’ on the sofa, Hester asks Joe to play the piano for her and while he plays she slips out of the bungalow. She feels an immense relief to be out in the cool night under the moon but then the playing stops and she, on impulse, shimmies up into the weeping willow which hangs over the stream. Joe comes calling for her, but quietly and pathetically, making her despise him even more. More comedy:

She began to cry, and fumbling in her sleeve for her hanky, she nearly fell out of the tree. Which brought her to her senses.

She worries that she must be abnormal. All the other girls love this love stuff. Suddenly there’s the sound of a car which pulls up at the gate to Joe’s place. Hesta scrambles down out of the tree and runs over. It’s none other than sister Henrietta, and the car is driven by Joe’s brother, Donald, and in the back is Teddy, a second cousin.

They all swear they don’t want to interrupt the love birds, they’ve come to stay on an adjoining farm, but Hester insists they come in. When Henrietta and Hester enter Joe is, of course, furious, which the innocent younger sister doesn’t understand. Hester wants them all to stay but Henrietta can see they’re not wanted and, after warming her hands at the fire.

In front of her Hester and Joe have a flaring row. Joe wants to know why Hester just walked out like that and Hester claims she has a very good reason so… What is it, asks naive Henrietta. The impatient boys out in the car toot their horn. Henrietta yells out the door for them to wait half a minute and turns back to the couple who are at daggers drawn. Finally Hester spits it out:

Her face flew into sudden strange fury. ‘Well, if you want to know, I absolutely can’t stand your making love to me, if that’s what you call the business… I couldn’t possibly marry him if he kept on being in love with me.’ She spoke the two words with almost snarling emphasis… ‘Nothing can be so perfectly humiliating as a man making love to you,’ said Hester. ‘I loathe it.’ (p.159)

Joe goes red with fury then pale with shock. The girls comment on horrible men:

‘I don’t believe I could stand that sort of thing, with any man. Henrietta, do you know what it is, being stroked and cuddled? It’s too perfectly awful and ridiculous.’
‘Yes!’ said Henrietta, musing sadly. ‘As if one were a perfectly priceless meat-pie, and the dog licked it tenderly before he gobbled it up. It is rather sickening, I agree.’
‘And what’s so awful, a perfectly decent man will go and get that way. Nothing is so awful as a man who has fallen in love,’ said Hester.
‘I know what you mean, Hester. So doggy!’ said Henrietta sadly. (p.159).

To be precise, the sisters agree that men are awful. But then in a comic twist Joe announces that he never lover her either. He only proposed and did all the lovey-dovey stuff because it was expected of him. All of which he says with a sneer. Is he sincere, or just recovering from being rejected. Hester is surprised but Henrietta is appalled.

And he realises what a pig he’s been and repents, And Hester for the first time sees:

the honest, patient love for her in his eyes, and the queer, quiet central desire. It was the first time she had seen it, that quiet, patient, central desire of a young man who has suffered during his youth, and seeks now almost with the slowness of age. A hot flush went over her heart. She felt herself responding to him. (p.161)

So she decides to stay and Henrietta slips out to let the love birds alone. Moral: love is a complicated thing.

None of That

22 pages. First-person narrative. The unnamed narrator meets Luis Colmenares in Venice. He’s a Mexican painter in exile. Surprisingly their conversation is all about a world-famous bullfighter from Mexico, Cuestra, who retired when an American woman, Ethel Cane, left him half a million dollars, and who Colmenares saw the other day swimming in the Lido.

Colmenares says he knew Ethel Cane in Paris before the war, when she knew ‘everybody’, was married to a painter (who wasn’t darling?) and had a mania for collecting antique furniture. Then she came to Mexico, attracted by the violence of the revolution, and hooked up with Colmenares, as someone she’d know in Paris. She came in search of a special man but her can-do energy and independence put off Mexican men, who were used to respect and obedience. They danced with her and expected her to become their mistress but she had a catchphrase: ‘I’m having none of that!’

So she became bored and insulted Mexico, saying it was nothing but little boys with guns.

She had an imaginary picture of herself as an extraordinary and potent woman who would make a stupendous change in the history of man. Like Catherine of Russia, only cosmopolitan, not merely Russian. And it is true, she was an extraordinary woman, with tremendous power of will, and truly amazing energy, even for an American woman. She was like a locomotive-engine stoked up inside and bursting with steam, which it has to let off by rolling a lot of trucks about. But I did not see how this was to cause a change in the tide of mortal affairs. It was only a part of the hubbub of traffic. She sent the trucks bouncing against one another with a clash of buffers, and sometimes she derailed some unfortunate item of the rolling-stock. (p.210)

(Cf the comic comparison of Hester with a car in ‘In Love’.) Colmenares was in thrall to her and flattered by her attention but she never had any intention of becoming an item. She used him for his information about Mexican history and society etc. Colmenares explains that he sometimes thought she wanted to be made love to, but realised that was only with her external self. Deep inside she despised men (‘she was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She only wanted passive maleness’), and only used them to try and ‘start something’, to be at the centre of something, to make something happen. He knew if he gave in to becoming her lover he would be chewed up and spat out and then the subject of humiliating stories told to others. So he felt a physical repulsion from her.

Anyway, the narrator prompts Colmenares to move things along and the painter comes to the bit where Ethel Cane meets the world-famous bullfighter, Cuesta. Well Colmenares took her to a bullfight. At first she was disgusted by the blood and killing but then Cuesta came on and performed like a god. When he kills a particularly demanding bull, Ethel goes mad and joins the rest of his intoxicated admirers. She cheers and he catches her eye and it visibly affects him, he is so distracted Colmenares worries he might make a mistake and be injured.

But he isn’t. Instead, later, Ethel asks whether Colmenares knows Cuesta (yes) and asks for an introduction. So Colmenares arranges for him to call round, dressed in his best, wearing a ponytail. He doesn’t speak any other language; Ethel speaks in French, which Colmenares translates. It’s a brief call but Cuesta takes to calling round regularly. He just sits there talking to the translator he brings, staring at Ethel all the time. He’s a pig, he’s an animal, when alone with Colmenares, he refers to Ethel in the crudest physical terms. He has no brains, no imagination, nothing fires him. Colmenares he’s not really even human.

Nevertheless Ethel is infatuated and asks Colmenares endlessly for his opinion. Suddenly she starts talking about killing herself. Mad with infatuation she doesn’t want her body to triumph over her imagination.

‘If my body is stronger than my imagination, I shall kill myself,’ she said… If my body was under the control of my imagination, I could take Cuesta for my lover, and it would be an imaginative act. But if my body acted without my imagination, I–I’d kill myself… If I can’t get my body on its feet again, and either forget him or else get him to make it an imaginative act with me–I–I shall kill myself.’ (p.220)

Colmenares tries to persuade both these people to walk away, Ethel to get on a train to New York and forget, Cuesta to stop tormenting her. But she is infatuated and Cuesta 1) thinks of her as a dish he wants to eat and 2) learns that she is rich, really rich, very, very rich. But neither of them want to be physical. Ethel takes herself too seriously to be so vulgar and Cuesta actually finds her pale whiteness repulsive.

Cuesta always goes to her house early in the evening, and for half an hour at most, claiming to be busy in the evening. But on his last visit, when Ethel asks why can’t he visit her for a full evening, he tells her she is welcome to come to her house at 11, when his evening business is finished. She is embarrassed and acts surprised that he is available so late. ‘If it’s a special occasion,’ he replies.

‘Come, then, at night–come at eleven, when I am free,’ he said, with supreme animal impudence, looking into her eyes.

A few days later Colmenares hears Ethel is ill. A day or two later it is announced she is dead. It was all hushed up but Colmenares knows she poisoned herself. In her will, she had left half her fortune to Cuesta. The will had been made some ten days before her death but it was allowed to stand and so he took the money.

The narrator complacently concludes that ‘Her body had got the better of her imagination, after all’ but Colmenares says it was worse than that. When Ethel and Cuesta retired to Cuesta’s bedroom, he handed over to a gang of his cronies who gang-raped her, telling them to be careful not to leave bruises or marks. The doctors at the inquest still found puzzling bruises but then another revolution broke out and the whole affair was overshadowed by larger violence. Mexico.

Sun (1928)

18 pages. Maurice and Juliet are Americans. They live in New York (East Forty-Seventh Street) where Maurice runs his own unspectacular but efficient business. He wears dark grey suits and parts his hair neatly. Since they had a little boy, Juliet has changed, becoming increasingly upset at her stifling life. The doctors recommend a break, in the sun, so she and her little boy take ship across the grey Atlantic and on to Italy.

Here she settles into a villa with a few servants. After a few weeks of lying dressed in the sunshine, she makes the decision to sunbathe naked and, after a little scouting round, finds a sheltered rocky place among cacti where she won’t be overseen. Lawrence describes her first occasion bathing quite naked and the wonderful feeling of coming back to life it awakens in her.

She slid off all her clothes, and lay naked in the sun, and as she lay she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance. Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his edges, the Sun! He faced down to her with blue body of fire, and enveloped her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly, her knees, her thighs and her feet.

Back at the villa she tells her little boy to strip and, reluctant and scared at first, he quickly gets used to scampering round in the nude.

‘He shall not grow up like his father,’ she said to herself. ‘Like a worm that the sun has never seen.’

A month or more passes (January through February) with Juliet sunbathing every day. She turns golden brown. She takes her boy with him to the secret place. There are a few minor incidents, like the time she realises he is standing before a snake and has to very carefully make him back away, while the snake disappears.

Then one day, walking naked among the bushes she comes across the peasant from the next-door podere tying wood to his donkey. He straightens and sees her and they make eye contact.

Then his eyes met hers, and she felt the blue fire running through her limbs to her womb, which was spreading in the helpless ecstasy. Still they looked into each other’s eyes, and the fire flowed between them, like the blue, streaming fire from the heart of the sun. And she saw the phallus rise under his clothing, and knew he would come towards her.
‘Mummy, a man! Mummy!’ The child had put a hand against her thigh. ‘Mummy, a man!’
She heard the note of fear and swung round.
‘It’s all right, boy!’ she said, and taking him by the hand, she led him back round the rock again, while the peasant watched her naked, retreating buttocks lift and fall.

She slips her grey shift on and goes back to the villa, lies on her bed and fantasises about him. Next day she is down at the secret rocky place when the villa’s ancient housemaid, Marinina, shouts down to her. Her husband is here, all the way from New York. Then she shows Maurice down the secret path to the sheltered sun terrace.

He looks immaculate in a dark grey suit and she realises what a totally indoor man he is. He for his part is shocked to see her standing completely naked and averts his eyes as he walks forward. They don’t embrace or touch, but discuss practicalities. The little boy sees his Dad and isn’t that moved. When Maurice takes him in his arms, the boy demands that he removes his jacket.

Juliet announces she’s never going back to New York, she couldn’t bear it. He hesitantly acquiesces then, for politeness’ sake, she asks if he can come out here. To her disappointment he says yes, he can probably manage a month.

She ended on an open note. But the voice of the abrupt, personal American woman had died out, and he heard the voice of the woman of flesh, the sun-ripe body. He glanced at her again and again, with growing desire and lessening fear.

They have lunch. Now Juliet had noticed that the peasant had lunch at the same time every day, at the house over on the next podere or terrace. He has it now, with his wife dressed in black. Juliet arranges their lunch so that Maurice sits with his back to the view while Juliet can see across to the peasant and his heavy wife. Juliet fantasies about sex with him, to be taken and drenched in sunlight with such an elemental force, and then part without all that tedious talking and engagement, just being uplifted and transported. Whereas, her husband! She looks at him over the lunch table.

There was a gleam in his eyes, a desperate kind of courage of desire to taste this new fruit, this woman with rosy, sun-ripening breasts tilting within her wrapper. And she thought of him with his blanched, etiolated little city figure, walking in the sun in the desperation of a husband’s rights.

God. Suddenly she realises white worm-like Maurice will make love to her and she will get pregnant again with his child and bear it and be trapped in the same sunless place. When all she longed for was to be transformed by wonderful sun-drenched sex with the solid, silent man of the earth.

And the story ends with this bitter note of her being trapped.

Note: the phallus

Interestingly, there seem to be two significantly different versions of this story. The online version includes several mentions of the peasant’s ‘phallus’, namely when she stumbles across him silently working in a little gully and he turns round and sees her naked and she sees his intense eyes but then notices his ‘phallus’ growing erect in his trousers. And ends with Juliet comparing the peasant’s big penis favourably with her husband’s ‘little, frantic penis’. Whereas the words phallus and penis don’t appear in the Penguin paperback version. There’s no mention of this in Aldington’s introduction and no notes, so I’m guessing that even in 1981, Penguin had to be careful and chose to print a bowdlerised version of the story, maybe that Lawrence himself toned down to secure publication. But that the Planet Gutenberg online version, created in 2004, felt free to use the uncensored version.

In the Penguin version it’s only at the very end that we learn of Juliet’s sun-filled infatuation with the peasant, or the idea of the peasant, and it felt to me like it came out of the blue, though was quite a powerful bombshell to end on. In the online version the incident in the gully with the phallus occurs earlier and so establishes the theme of sex-with-the-peasant much earlier, which is then reprised at the end. We are more prepared for Juliet’s sense of lust lost at the end.

Both ‘work’ but to produce different flavours. If I was forced to choose, I’d prefer the censored Penguin version. This is because the effects of the sun on Juliet’s body and consciousness are reasonably subtle, as is the interplay of her with her little boy and how he gets used to playing naked. But when you read of a phallus engorging, let alone the comparison of two men’s penises, it doesn’t exactly move things into the realm of pornography, but it does undermine the subtlety of the other perceptions and descriptions. I think the censored version is slightly crippled in shape by having the sexual impact of the gully episode played down; but the benefit is that you pay more attention to Juliet’s changing feelings.

Credit

‘The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1928 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1981 Penguin Classics paperback edition, though most of the stories are available online.

Related links

The Planet Gutenberg version of this collection has slightly different stories, in a different order.

Related reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 7, 2025

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England, My England by D.H. Lawrence (1922)

‘England, My England’ is a collection of ten short stories by D. H. Lawrence. They were written between 1913 and 1921 and most of them had been published in magazines or periodicals. This ten were later selected and extensively revised by Lawrence for publication in this volume.

All bar the final two are war stories in the sense that they take place at least partly during the war or the characters have been affected by the war or, as in the first story, are shown actually fighting and dying in it.

  1. England, My England
  2. Tickets, Please
  3. The Blind Man
  4. Monkey Nuts
  5. Wintry Peacock
  6. You Touched Me
  7. Samson and Delilah
  8. The Primrose Path
  9. The Horse Dealer’s Daughter
  10. Fanny And Annie

1. England, My England

Winifred and Egbert are married and live in Crockham Cottage, by woods and commons and bogs and streams in rural Hampshire. The cottage is in the extensive grounds of Winifred’s father, a successful businessman, who has also provided cottages for his other daughters, Priscilla and Magdelen. The mother is a published poetess. It’s an arty family.

The bulk of the text describes the tortuous emotionally fraught marriage of Winifred and Egbert. They married ten years before the start of the war i.e. 1904. Initially they are very much in love and Egbert is a handsome charming fine figure of a man, very interested in the folk stories and folk music of Olde England. And Lawrence repeatedly describes the cottage as having a mysterious atmosphere, of somehow invoking the spirit of the ancients.

Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons came, so long ago… t belonged to the old England of hamlets and yeomen. Lost all alone on the edge of the common, at the end of a wide, grassy, briar-entangled lane shaded with oak, it had never known the world of today…

But Egbert, for all his charm, is, alas, useless. He has an inherited income of £150 which is just enough to prevent him trying for a job or career or profession and so he dawdles about doing DIY on the farm which always ends up breaking or not working.

He… had such a passion for his old enduring cottage, and for the old enduring things of the bygone England. Curious that the sense of permanency in the past had such a hold over him, whilst in the present he was all amateurish and sketchy.

With the arrival of three children Winifred has become a full-time mother, worried about practicalities and finds her husband exasperating.

Egbert’s thoughtless impracticality is exemplified one day when he leaves a scythe he’d used for mowing grass carelessly lying about and his favourite daughter, Joyce, cuts her knee on it. Local doctor Dr Wing is very prolix and calming but doesn’t treat the wound properly and the leg becomes infected. So the practical father sends Egbert further afield to fetch Dr Wayne from Bingham. By this time the joint is infected and Wayne recommends having Joyce stretchered to a car to drive her to a London clinic. Here commence weeks then months of laborious treatment but the upshot is the girl will be crippled for life, requires clunky leg braces and crutches. Egbert is mortified. You can imagine Winifred’s feelings.

Then the Great War starts (August 1914) and Egbert is called up to the army. A year of training. He hates coming home in his khaki. Nowadays Winifred and the girls are mostly based in London to be near the hospital, so often Egbert is alone, working at his rather futile projects in the cottage grounds.

The story reaches a climax when, after a year’s training, he’s sent to France and the narrative cuts to him in action, in a machine gun nest under command of an officer trying to locate the enemy from the sounds of distant firing. Then shells begin to descend, at first at a distance, then getting nearer, then there is a direct hit and Lawrence gives a florid and persuasive account of being knocked out and slowly, groggily regaining consciousness.

Were they the stars in the dark sky? Was it possible it was stars in the dark sky? Stars? The world? Ah, no, he could not know it! Stars and the world were gone for him, he closed his eyes. No stars, no sky, no world. No, No! The thick darkness of blood alone. It should be one great lapse into the thick darkness of blood in agony.

Death, oh, death! The world all blood, and the blood all writhing with death. The soul like the tiniest little light out on a dark sea, the sea of blood. And the light guttering, beating, pulsing in a windless storm, wishing it could go out, yet unable.

The last line has the knockout punch of a classic short story, when the Germans who’ve occupied his position hear a slight noise, of earth falling away, and from the heap of earth thrown up by their shells, see the dead face.

Thoughts

This is a dense, packed and ultimately unpleasant story. To start at the end, the description of dying – which is what I take it to be – is fulsome and persuasive but, as a subject, strikes me as the kind of thing you find in school magazines.

The half dozen pages devoted to the little girl being cut, inflamed then losing the use of her leg are upsetting. Even in fiction I don’t like children being hurt. What makes it Lawrentian is the emotional ambiguity because, even after Joyce has been confirmed disabled, there is a secret sympathy between her and her father, which has them sharing glances and smiles in a way she just can’t with her more conventional mother. The irrationality of emotions.

But the real puzzle is why the story is titled ‘My England’. At the beginning Lawrence goes on repeatedly about the ancientness of the landscape and the way the old cottage has seen countless generations of inhabitants live out their lives and passions, stretching back to Saxon times. So you think the story is going to be a paean to English country living. But as my summary shows, it’s anything but. The positive vibe of the deep ancestral England trope is cut across by three big negatives:

  1. The deep problems with the Egbert-Winifred marriage.
  2. The terrible accident with the scythe.
  3. Egbert’s grisly death in the end.

In what sense is any of this Lawrence’s England? Is he showing that the war ruined his England? But the supposed rural idyll was wrecked long before the war came along? Does the first half demonstrate how difficult it is to live up to the image or inheritance of deep England?

Or is the point that he was writing during an era marked by a national outpouring of relatively unthinking, uncritical patriotism, when headlines went on about patriotism and decency and women handed out white feathers in the street and Lawrence’s response is to show that life is never that simple or inconvenient; that life is full of complexity and cross-currents and disappointments and ineffectuality and stupid accidents?

That his England wasn’t the unquestioned totem of the jingos but a deeply fraught and complex and troubling entity?

2. Tickets, Please

Set during the war. The first half sets up life on the long tram line which runs out of Nottingham into the countryside, beside rivers to collieries, and the happy-go-lucky lives of the staff. Since it’s wartime and the men have been called up, the conductors are women. They have a great collegiate spirit and love flirting with the (still male) drivers.

Inspectors hop on and off the trams to inspect tickets. The cheekiest is a lad who fancies himself, John Thomas Raynor, known, behind his back, as Coddy.

There is considerable scandal about John Thomas in half a dozen villages. He flirts with the girl conductors in the morning, and walks out with them in the dark night, when they leave their tram-car at the depôt. Of course, the girls quit the service frequently. Then he flirts and walks out with the newcomer: always providing she is sufficiently attractive, and that she will consent to walk.

The feistiest of the girl conductors is Annie Stone, ‘something of a Tartar’. She has Coddy’s measure. They know each other almost like man and wife. November arrives and the annual Statutes fair. Lawrence gives a fascinating account of the fair: roundabouts, coconuts:

Here was the same crush, the press of faces lighted up by the flares and the electric lights, the same smell of naphtha and a few fried potatoes, and of electricity.

Who should she bump into but John Thomas? They have a whale of a time, he is great fun, ladding about on the dragons, the horses, playing quoits, slipping his arm round her in the darkness of the cinema.

In the days that follow she wants to develop this into what we nowadays call a relationship, what Lawrence calls ‘taking an intelligent interest’ in her; but (to put it mildly) any form of commitment is the opposite of what John Thomas wants and he sheers away. Annie is upset then goes into a tailspin, typically Lawrentian in its extremity:

Then she wept with fury, indignation, desolation, and misery. Then she had a spasm of despair. And then, when he came, still impudently, on to her car, still familiar, but letting her see by the movement of his head that he had gone away to somebody else for the time being, and was enjoying pastures new, then she determined to have her own back.

Annie goes round the other girls determined to discover who John Thomas’s latest conquest is. This has the effect of rallying all the girls against him. The climax of the story comes at the end of a long day when the girls are all in their cosy warm waiting room and Coddy drops by to flirt with them.

To his surprise he is met with scorn which turns to anger. It starts with a joke about which one of them he’ll take home that night to keep warm but quite quickly it becomes menacing. They all shout at him demanding to know and he turns from bantering cock of the roost to irritated and then intimidated.

And then it goes wild. As he turns to go, Annie leaps forward and clouts him round the head. As he’s staggering, the others jump on him too. They are screaming and cuffing him and scratching him and tearing his clothes while he can’t throw them off, not seven shrieking women. Again and again they scream in his face, ‘Choose one!’

It’s only when he shouts through the mayhem that he chooses Annie that they stop fighting. Stunned, Annie refuses to touch him and backs away and the other girls get off him. Trying to recover his dignity, Coddy gets to his feet, collects his overcoat from the peg and goes to the door. It’s locked and Annie has the key. Dazed, she lets him out, and turns to the other girls who are fixing their hair and getting ready to go home. None of them can process what’s just happened.

Thoughts

Is it about the mayhem the war has unleashed? Is it that the war has unleashed the violence in everyone, a tone established at the funfair, which has a feverish gaiety? The sentence just before John Thomas goes into the girls nice, snug waiting room, reads: ‘Outside was the darkness and lawlessness of war-time’, suggesting that what follows is ‘the darkness and lawlessness of war-time’ invading even the young womens’ retreat?

Or is it the more modern idea that the war upended ‘gender norms’, with women doing ‘mens’ jobs? But why, then, the mob violence?

To my mind the girls are modern reincarnations of maenads, defined as ‘female follower of Bacchus, traditionally associated with divine possession and frenzied rites’. In one version of the Greek myths, the maenads tear Orpheus to pieces.

The point of literature is it leaves you to make your own mind up.

(It also reminds me of the early Ian McEwan story where two women discover a man is cheating on them both, so drug him, tie him to a table and surgically remove his penis. More graphic in a schlocky way, but the same underlying idea of female fury at the cock of the walk.)

3. The Blind Man

A blistering, intense, strange tale. Big strong, self-contained Maurice Pervin has been blinded in the war. Now he lives with his loving wife, Isabel, on a farm. They are educated middle class. The actual farming is done by the Wernham family, more working class, who talk in dialect, who live in the lower farm buildings.

There is much description, in the classic Lawrence style, of the vacillating moods of the couple. To begin with, surprisingly, despite his blindness they revelled in a new kind of intimacy because it brought them so very close together, as he learned his way about the rooms, blind. But then both of them experienced fallings away Isabel feeling exhausted, Maurice liable to plunges into deep depression.

They had a baby but it died young. Now Isabel is very heavily pregnant and expecting a second baby in the next few weeks. She has invited an old friend to visit, Bertram Reid, a barrister and a man of letters, a Scotchman. They’ve been close friends for decades, almost like family. But when Maurice went away to war, Isabel asked Bertie to stop writing, as a gesture of faithfulness to her husband.

The key points are that Maurice and Bertie met several times before the war and instinctively didn’t like each other. Bertie is morbidly sensitive about being touched or even being close to people, emotionally close. He is small and dapper and intelligent and likes the company of women until they start to crowd him, when he recoils.

It was Maurice who suggested her old friend visit. He thinks it will cheer his wife up. He’s off in the form doing something while night falls and she becomes more anxious about the arrival of the ‘trap’ i.e. horse and cart, which will bring Bertie.

In an evocative scene she goes out and past the Wernham part of the farm and they very hospitably invite her in to share their tea. Chat and a roaring fire. But then she makes her excuses and presses on into the dark farm buildings to find her husband.

Of course her husband, blind for a year, knows his way round the farm buildings in the dark, so there are no lamps, and there are no electric lights, and so Lawrence gives a vivid, thrilling account of her moving through the absolute pitch black, amid the noises and smells of the cattle stalls, quietly calling his name.

Anyway she finds him and leads him back to their house. Here they both go to their rooms to wash and change. The trap finally arrives and she goes out to greet Bertie and Maurice overhears their conversation and is troubled with jealousy and emotions.

Down in the living room Bertie settles in and a servant brings dinner. The whole topic of the big blind man brings out the supernaturally brilliant in Lawrence’s imagining and writing. At the table:

Maurice was feeling, with curious little movements, almost like a cat kneading her bed, for his place, his knife and fork, his napkin. He was getting the whole geography of his cover into his consciousness. He sat erect and inscrutable, remote-seeming Bertie watched the static figure of the blind man, the delicate tactile discernment of the large, ruddy hands, and the curious mindless silence of the brow, above the scar.

They eat then afterwards, draw their chairs up to the fire. Making conversation, Bertie tentatively asks about his blindness and Maurice shrugs it off. But extended talk about it upsets him and he begins to feel stifled.

At length Maurice rose restlessly, a big, obtrusive figure. He felt tight and hampered. He wanted to go away.

He makes an excuse to go and talk to the farmer and leaves. Bertie and Isabel talk on for a time, but then it is late. By now it’s raining outside. The final part of the story is that Isabel is 9 months pregnant and tired so she asks Bertie, the dapper urban intellectual, to go and find Maurice and fetch him back.

So now we see the narrow walkways of the pitch-black farm buildings from Bertie’s point of view. He finds him, right enough, turning the handle of a turnip pulper. They talk. Maurice asks him to tell him, candidly, what his face looks like. And then, in this dark and spectral environment, Maurice asks if he can touch Bertie’s face. Taken by surprise, Bertie says yes, and so the big man very gently lays his big hands on the small fellah’s hair, head, eyes, cheek, mouth, down to his shoulders and arms – as when he was settling into his place at the table, so now he is accommodating Bertie into his blind universe.

Then he asks Bertie to touch his eyes which the little man very reluctantly does. Now, the big man declares, they know each other. Now they can be friends. And allows himself to be taken back to the main house living room.

Big Maurice is smiling, is satisfied with his knowledge. You might have expected some kind of happy ending, like the two men have reached a new understanding but as so often in Lawrence, it isn’t a happy ending, it is conflicted and broken. Because Isabel instantly realises that her clever friend has just received the greatest trauma of his life and is screaming with discomfort inside. And ends it with a disgusting simile.

He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken. (p.75)

4. Monkey Nuts

Just after the war (I think) Albert the 40-year-old corporal and stupid young Joe are still in the army but now back in England. They work forking hay from carts which bring it from the country into train trucks at a station. They share the same bedroom so know all about each other.

One of the troops of carts that come is run by Miss Stokes. She’s a ballsy woman who knows her own mind. She falls for Joe and becomes domineering, insisting on talking to him at their daily meeting, listening to Albert’s endless jokes and banter but ignoring him.

A new level is attained when Miss Stokes writes Joe a letter asking for a rendezvous at a nearby station. She signs it MS. Joe shows Albert the letter but ignores it. When Miss Stokes next arrives with haycarts Albert can’t stop himself ribbing her about the letter and asks what MS stands for. Angrily, Miss Stokes replies ‘monkey nuts’. Because this becomes the leitmotiv of the story, I assume it’s an Edwardian insults.

The circus arrives in a nearby town and Albert and Jo go to visit it. They see Miss Stokes in the audience but ignore her. But on the 6-mile walk home they come across her, banter, then she asks Albert to take her punctured bicycle onto the town for repair, while she asks Joe to walk her home to the farm where she lives. Joe is super reluctant but it is the chivalrous thing to do so can’t back down.

From that evening he keeps disappearing every night to squire her around but hates it. He goes so far as to say ‘There’ll be murder done one of these days’ and the reader wonders whether it really will turn into a gruesome murder story.

One night Albert asks Joe if he can go on the date with Miss Stokes. He is surprised to discover Miss Stokes in a fine dress and hat; she is mortified that the old joker and not Joe has come, turns and walks back to her farm without saying a word; Albert is mortified to see tears rolling down her face.

They have one last encounter. On a cold grey morning she brings her cart up to the station and begins pestering Joe, calling his name. Eventually he turns round a cries at her ‘monkey nuts’ and this has a dramatic effect.

‘Joe!’ Her voice rang for the third time.
Joe turned and looked at her, and a slow, jeering smile gathered on his face.
‘Monkey-nuts!’ he replied, in a tone mocking her call.
She turned white – dead white. The men thought she would fall. (p.89)

The hay is unloaded, she drives off and never returns. They never see her again. And, Lawrence tells us, Joe is more relieved than when he heard news of the armistice.

5. Wintry Peacock

A rarity in a Lawrence story, a first-person narrative. He appears to be an educated, middle-class man. It’s winter and he’s living alone in a nice house. He’s out walking when a farmer’s wife he’s seen before comes out of a building, spots him and beckons him over.

She’s Mrs Goyte. She’s received a letter, written in French, addressed to her husband, Alfred. He served in the Army in France, was wounded and is currently away convalescing. And this French letter has arrived. She can’t read French and knows the narrator is an educated man, so asks if he can read it for us.

First he reads it through to himself which allows Lawrence to give us the full unexpurgated text. We learn that it is from a Belgian girl, Élise, who is writing to tell him that she has had their baby. She says she loves him, misses him and threatens to come and visit him with the child.

So when Mrs Goyte insists that he translates it, the narrator gives a censored or bowdlerised version, insisting that it’s to tell him that the girl’s mother has had a baby, a new baby brother for him, and letting him know because he was such a lovely guest when he was billeted on them.

This is quite funny, as funny as Lawrence gets. What gives it relish is that Mrs Goyte doesn’t believe a word of it, insisting the girl is pregnant, imagining she’s only one of the women her husband went out with.

This performance is interrupted by the arrival of three peacocks. Mrs Goyte makes a big fuss of the eldest of them who’s in fact father of the other two, Joey, a grey-brown peacock with a blue neck.

Well, the narrator does his best to pitch his version of the letters but Mrs Goyte isn’t having any of it. Next morning the estate is covered in snow but looking out his big west windows, the narrator sees something struggling in the snow down by a copse, puts on coat and boots and tramps down to the copse where he discovers it’s none other than Joey.

He brings the bedraggled bird back to the house, dries him, puts him in a basket in a warm room with food. Next morning Joey’s made a mess of the food and is sitting on the back of an armchair. He bundles him into a fishing basket and carries him over to the Goyte farm. He’s welcomed by Mrs Goyte whose name we learn is Maggie, backed up by the father-in-law, old Mr Goyte and his grey-haired wife. It’s the details about people and places in Lawrence which are so lovely, which snag and delight your mind.

Mr. Goyte spoke very slowly and deliberately, quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his voice. (p.101)

And here is Alfred, the addressee of the famous letter, dressed in khaki, standing tall, his beret at a rakish angle, a brash, confident man’s man.

The family invite the narrator in for tea and the father quietly tells the narrator that Alfred and Maggie had a big fight over the letter but he reckons they should forget about it, it all happened a long way away and need come no nigher.

Tea is pleasant enough and afterwards the narrator is walking back down the snowy road when he sees a figure making a bee line across the field to him. It’s big confident Alfred. He confronts the narrator and tells him his wife burned the letter, he wants to know what was in it. The narrator recites it honestly, as far as he can remember, then emphasises that he cooked up a story for the wife, denying it was Alfred’s baby.

The two men square off, circling each other psychologically, the narrator asks questions about this Élise, Alfred laconic, not giving anything away.

He stood smiling, with the long, subtle malice of a farmer.

Alfred reveals very little about the Belgian woman except that he doesn’t give a damn about her and her baby. He’s far more exercised by Joey the peacock who he hates; he reveals he tried to shoot it once and he’s going to wring its neck before long.

As their exchange draws to an end, the big man starts laughing out loud at the preposterousness of the whole situation, before turning and setting off back to his house, and then, in an unexpected last line, which leaves the story ringing in your memory:

I ran down the hill, shouting with laughter.

6. You Touched Me

Set in an old pottery after it’s closed (compare the closing of the Pervin horse trading business in the Horse Dealers Daughter). Two sisters, Emmie and Matilda Rockley, live on in the silent buildings where there had been so much noise and hubbub. Brought up in a middle class household they refuse to consort with the mostly working class population of this ugly industrial town and so are turning into spinsters.

Having set the scene, Lawrence gives us the backstory:

Ted Rockley, the father of the girls, had had four daughters, and no son. As his girls grew, he felt angry at finding himself always in a house-hold of women. He went off to London and adopted a boy out of a Charity Institution. Emmie was fourteen years old, and Matilda sixteen, when their father arrived home with his prodigy, the boy of six, Hadrian.

Hadrian enjoys a privileged boyhood but continually rebels, sells off his school uniform etc. The four sisters try to make him welcome but he never fits in. Aged 15 he declares he wants to go to the colonies and gets passage to Canada. He writes to the family for a while then stops.

The First World War starts (August 1914) and Hadrian enlists and comes to Europe but he doesn’t visit the Rockleys in Pottery House. Finally, after the armistice (November 1918) Hadrian writes to say he wants to visit. The two remaining daughters (the others have married and left) set about cleaning and tidying the house for his arrival the following day, but he arrives on the day of the cleaning, finding them both dirty and unprepared, while he is sporting his best uniform.

What happens is Hadrian ends up staying for weeks and inveigles his way into the good books of old man Rockley, who is very sick and dying. On the second day Matilda stays up with her father and they discuss the future. He makes her promise not to leave the house. He says everything will be left to her and Emmie, equally and he’d like them to give Hadrian his watch and chain, and a hundred pounds.

Back in her room Matilda stays up late worrying about the future and her father, who might die at any minute. She feels she must be with him so at midnight, tired and slightly dazed, goes down the hall to his room. She tiptoes in in the dark and finds the bed and whispers to him as she reaches out to find his face, running her hand over his hair, forehead, nose, moustache.

It’s only at this point that Hadrian speaks up. In her daze Matilda had forgotten that they had moved their father down to the living room and put Hadrian in his old bedroom. God, she’s embarrassed! She apologises and runs back to her room. She is mortified and feels she hates Hadrian. Unfortunately her touch has woken something in him which he has been fighting against his whole life, his feelings.

The soft, straying tenderness of her hand on his face startled something out of his soul. He was a charity boy, aloof and more or less at bay. The fragile exquisiteness of her caress startled him most, revealed unknown things to him. (p.116)

And so:

The same glamour that he knew in the elderly man he now saw in the woman. And he wanted to possess himself of it, he wanted to make himself master of it. As he went about through the old pottery-yard, his secretive mind schemed and worked. To be master of that strange soft delicacy such as he had felt in her hand upon his face,—this was what he set himself towards. He was secretly plotting. (p.117)

So during one of his sessions sitting with his adoptive father, Hadrian slowly brings the conversation round to who will stay at the house, who will look after it, how the girls will be lonely and then… springs the idea that he would like to marry Matilda. But Emmie is the youngest, his father days. But secretly the father has always loved the boy and this incongruous idea pleases him.

A few days later Matilda is sitting with him and he floats the suggestion of her marrying Hadrian. She is so appalled and reacts so negatively that she makes the sick old man angry. In a rage he threatens to call for his solicitor, Whittle and cut both the girls out of his will and leave everything to Hadrian.

Emmie confronts Hadrian in the garden and calls him a money-grubber. He hadn’t actually realised he wanted the money, he had only intended to have Matilda, but now she mentions it, he realises he wants the money too. He wants to be one of the employing class, not an employee.

Mr Rockley calls for the solicitor and presses ahead with a new will. The old division between the daughters becomes provisional.

The old will held good, if Matilda would consent to marry Hadrian. If she refused then at the end of six months the whole property passed to Hadrian.

Why? Maybe the motivation is the key thing here. Old Rockley had had four daughters and come to hate being surrounded by women. That’s why he went and got a 6-year-old boy from a charity, because his masculinity felt embattled and isolated. Same now.

Mr. Rockley told this to the young man, with malevolent satisfaction. He seemed to have a strange desire, quite unreasonable, for revenge upon the women who had surrounded him for so long, and served him so carefully.

Hadrian suggests the old man calls a meeting with the two women, which he does. The malice of decision has, paradoxically, given the sick old man a burst of energy. ‘His face had again some of its old, bright handsomeness.’ He puts the same ultimatum, Matilda must marry Hadrian. She refuses. They argue and Emmie in a rage says, well alright then, the filthy guttersnipe can have everything. Rockley is overcome with fatigue and tells them to leave. The nurse sits up with him all night.

With Rockley approaching his end, Emmie takes the initiative and calls the solicitor for a family meeting (without the old man) and tries to get the lawyers, and then the local vicar and other relatives, to intimidate Hadrian and make him back down. Of course they don’t, they just make him angry.

A few days later Hadrian manages to corner Matilda, who’s been avoiding him, in the garden. She lists all the negative reasons, starting with she’s old enough to be his mother, was 16 when he came as a surly 6-year-old to the household. None of this washes with Hadrian who insists, with robotic repetition, that it’s her fault because she touched him and woke something which can’t now be put back to sleep.

‘You put your hand on me, though,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, and then I should never have thought of it. You shouldn’t have touched me.’
‘If you were anything decent, you’d know that was a mistake, and forget it,’ she said.
‘I know it was a mistake—but I shan’t forget it. If you wake a man up, he can’t go to sleep again because he’s told to.’ (p.123)

Matilda goes to see her father and… agrees. She agrees to marry Hadrian. the very ill father is pleased. But it doesn’t mean she’ll like him. Hadrian is a short man and Matilda is tall. She continues to look down on him, literally and figuratively. When they meet she refuses to answer his conversation.

The arrangements are swiftly made (before the father dies) and just three days later they’re married in a registry office. Then they hasten to the sick old man on his death bed, and there’s a wonderfully fraught, emotionally charged scene, in which all kinds of cross currents and mysterious motivations are at play.

Matilda and Hadrian drove straight home from the registrar, and went straight into the room of the dying man. His face lit up with a clear twinkling smile.
‘Hadrian—you’ve got her?’ he said, a little hoarsely.
‘Yes,’ said Hadrian, who was pale round the gills.
‘Ay, my lad, I’m glad you’re mine,’ replied the dying man. Then he turned his eyes closely on Matilda.
‘Let’s look at you, Matilda,’ he said. Then his voice went strange and unrecognisable. ‘Kiss me,’ he said.
She stooped and kissed him. She had never kissed him before, not since she was a tiny child. But she was quiet, very still.
‘Kiss him,’ the dying man said.
Obediently, Matilda put forward her mouth and kissed the young husband.
‘That’s right! That’s right!’ murmured the dying man.

Who’s won? Is it about the triumph of the old man, the dead hand of the dying generation? Or will Matilda succumb, over time? Is it the triumph of malicious, calculating little Hadrian? Or all of the above? It feels rich and strange and perverse and improbable but, on some other level, weirdly right. The Lawrence effect.

7. Samson and Delilah

It is the first year of the war. A man alights from the motor-omnibus that runs from Penzance to St Just-in-Penwith, and turns uphill towards the Polestar. Night is falling and the lighthouse light circles round over sea and land. He arrives at The Tinners’ Rest pub and goes in. The buxom landlady is serving some soldiers.

Long story short, the stranger insists he is the landlady’s husband who ran off to America 16 years earlier: he is Willie Nankervis, she is Alice Nankervis, and the young serving girl is their daughter, Maryann. When closing time comes (10pm) he refuses to leave. The landlady insists. He refuses and says he’s going to sleep there. The soldiers mildly suggest he leave, he refuses.

Mrs Nankervis fetches some rope from behind the bar and asks the soldiers to tie the stranger. He’s a big man but there are four soldiers so after a titanic struggle with chairs and tables thrown everywhere, they manage to rope him like a steer, with some spare braces used to knit his knees and ankles.

They carry him outside and lay him in the empty town square under the cold stars. The soldiers undo the braces and the sergeant loosens the rope. Then they both go back inside the bar and lock it. The stranger staggers to his feet and frays the rope against the corner of a wall till it snaps and he staggers off through the empty town.

He comes to the graveyard and leans against the wall for a while. This is to allow Lawrence to let the soldiers finally leave the inn. The man turns and walks back to the pub. He is surprised to find the door open and walks through the empty bar to the kitchen. The landlady is sitting in front of a fire. She isn’t surprised or angry when he appears but resigned.

He sits down next to her and they talk, both tentative, she sparking into anger several times at the way he left her, at the way he stopped even writing letters after six months. But slowly they settle into what you could call a connubial mood, and then into intimacy.

Lawrence is supposed to be ‘sex mad’ but it’s a very rare moment of explicitness when the big handsome man leans forward and places his hand between her big breasts. This kind of candid intimacy happens hardly at all in Lawrence before Lady Chatterley, which makes it all the more beautiful and striking.

‘We fet from the start, we did. And, my word, you begin again quick the minute you see me, you did. Darn me, you was too sharp for me. A darn fine woman, puts up a darn good fight. Darn me if I could find a woman in all the darn States as could get me down like that. Wonderful fine woman you be, truth to say, at this minute.
She only sat glowering into the fire.
‘As grand a pluck as a man could wish to find in a woman, true as I’m here,’ he said, reaching forward his hand and tentatively touching her between her full, warm breasts, quietly.
She started, and seemed to shudder. But his hand insinuated itself between her breasts, as she continued to gaze in the fire.
‘And don’t you think I’ve come back here a-begging,” he said. “I’ve more than one thousand pounds to my name, I have. And a bit of a fight for a how-de-do pleases me, that it do. But that doesn’t mean as you’re going to deny as you’re my Missis…’

It has that strange uncanny correctness, a truth to some deeper vein of feeling, which so much Lawrence reveals, in his characters and, by extension, in us.

8. The Primrose Path

Daniel Sutton the black-sheep, the youngest, the darling of his mother’s family. He had three older sister. He ran away to Australia. The story starts with him back in England, in London, where he’s set up as a taxi driver. The narrative opens here, at the taxi rank of a rural train station, when he is approached by his nephew, Daniel Berry, his sister, Anna’s, boy.

In a flashback we learn that Daniel married a factory girl, Maud, they had two daughters but were never close, their house lacked warmth. Eventually he fell in love with a sentimental young woman and emigrated to Australia. His jilted wife settled in with a publican.

The nephew requests a ride to Watmore. On the way the driver tells him he dumped the woman he ran off with in Wellington, convinced she was trying to poison him, and decamped for Sydney. The nephew asks if he’ll go back to Maud but he angrily says no, she wouldn’t take him. Tells him she’s living in the Railway Arms pub. In fact he got a message this morning to visit her. She’s dying of tuberculosis (which they called consumption back then).

In Watmore the nephew does his business, they have a pint in a pub then Dan drives him back towards the station. En route the uncle is visibly nervous. They pull over at the pub and go in. The landlord is startled to see Dan there but draws him and the nephew a pint. Then takes Dan upstairs to the room over the bar. Here his abandoned wife is lying very sick in bed. She has a little pet bird in a nest of ivy leaves on the wall. She is very sick and can barely speak. She asks him to look after their daughter, Winnie. Dan is gruff and nervous, asks if there is anything he can do for her, eventually says his goodbye and leaves.

From the pub Dan drives his nephew to his own house. This he finds looked after by a mature woman, cowed and obedient, and her pretty daughter, who Uncle Dan is obviously having an affair with. When Berry mentions that they’ve been to see his uncle Maud she, like Dan, looks scared. All these people are scared of the consequences of the life choices they’ve made.

And it’s to hide his fear and anxiety that Dan is so rough. ‘Already Berry could see that his uncle had bullied them, as he bullied everybody.’ Dan is all gruffness. When the scared mother serves soup he refuses to come and sit at table to eat it but insists on standing in front of the fire. The young mistress tries to soften him, asks him to take off his coat. And then there’s one of those many, many alchemical scenes in Lawrence, where he reveals the strange twisted nature of our affections, the crooked timber of humanity.

‘Do take your coat off, Dan,’ she said, and she took hold of the breast of his coat, trying to push it back over his shoulder. But she could not. Only the stare in his eyes changed to a glare as her hand moved over his shoulder. He looked down into her eyes. She became pale, rather frightened-looking, and she turned her face away, and it was drawn slightly with love and fear and misery. She tried again to put off his coat, her thin wrists pulling at it. He stood solidly planted, and did not look at her, but stared straight in front. She was playing with passion, afraid of it, and really wretched because it left her, the person, out of count. Yet she continued. And there came into his bearing, into his eyes, the curious smile of passion, pushing away even the death-horror. It was life stronger than death in him. She stood close to his breast. Their eyes met, and she was carried away.

And she does get his coat off. And the nephew sees that ‘the pain, the fear, the horror in his breast’ are all transformed into ‘the new, fiercest flame of passion’. Maybe love is a way of hiding from fear, fear of age, illness and death. Maybe this kind of desperate love.

And you think you’ve figured out the twisted depths of the story but Lawrence has a sharp blow to the gut still to deliver.

‘That girl will leave him,’ [Berry] said to himself. ‘She’ll hate him like poison. And serve him right. Then she’ll go off with somebody else.’ And she did. (p.156)

9. The Horse Dealer’s Daughter

Three brothers and a sister sit in a front room trying to discuss their futures. The family business in horses has gone bankrupt and they watch the last posse of shire horses being led through their gates. The servants have left, the house – Oldmeadow – is empty. They have to clear out by the following Wednesday.

The siblings are Joe Pervin, 33, handsome. He’s engaged to a woman his own age who is steward of a neighbouring estate, he’ll find him a job. Fred Henry is the second eldest. Malcolm is the youngest, a mere 22. Mabel, the sister, has been talked at and ignored by her brothers for so long she ignores them now.

Enter a family friend, Jack Fergusson. He’s got a bit of a cold. He banters with Fred Henry who’s his friend, they agree to go to the pub that night. Then the men exit, leaving sullen Mabel to clear things away. For ten years she’s been slaving for them. Initially she loved her mother till she died, then loved her father till he remarried. Then he, too, died the three sons lived in high style, spending money, sleeping with the serving women who had a terrible reputation and bore them illegitimate children. She put up with the humiliation because there was always money which made her feel special. Now all that’s ended. Probably she’ll have to go and live with her married sister, Lucy.

Faithful to the memory of her dead mother, that afternoon she takes scissors and brush to visit the graveyard, to trim and scrub her mother’s grave. Nearby is the town doctor’s house. Fergusson is a hired assistant, always overworked with chores. He happens to glance out the window and see her at her mother’s grave. Their eyes meet. But she is not a bright young happy women, she is heavy and mournful and imperturbable. They both continue with their tasks.

A lot later, as dusk is falling, Fergusson is coming back from his round of handing out pills and potions to colliers and iron-workers, heading back towards the ugly town when, at some distance, he sees someone walking down to the big pond in the dip. In the failing light he just about makes out Mabel and is amazed that, when she gets to the edge of the pond, she just carries on walking, into the water, up to her knees, her hips, her bosom, then disappears from view.

Flabbergasted, he runs bounding over the field down to the pond and starts to wade out. Lawrence gives a masterful description of the feel of the thick filthy clay at the bottom of the pond sucking his feet as he wades in then, inevitably, slips and falls underwater, panicking in the freezing water, before surfacing with Mabel’s dress in his hands and seizing and carrying her out, laying her on the grass – it doesn’t sound like anyone knew about pumping the chest or the kiss of life, but she starts to breathe.

Then he carries her very heavy weight back up to the empty house, strips her naked, rubs her dry with towels and wraps her in a dry blanket. Then fetches spirits for himself and her. He plans to strip and find dry clothing himself when she comes to with a start. She can’t remember walking into the pond. Confused she asks if he jumped in to save her.

Only then does she fully realise she is naked and ask if he undressed her. And this triggers a – to us – wildly irrational development which is she becomes convinced this means he loves her. And as if a dam burst in her rigid impassivity she crawls to him and embraces his knees (he is standing).

‘Do you love me then?’ she asked.
He only stood and stared at her, fascinated. His soul seemed to melt.
She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes, of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.
‘You love me,’ she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. ‘You love me. I know you love me, I know.’

Lawrence often depicts emotional ambivalence, maybe it is his core subject. All his most vivid characters love and hate each other and experience wild mood swings in between. Same here. Fergusson had thought that rescuing Mabel, stripping and towelling her dry, was done from purely professional motives. Now she has confused things. This rather mad desperate declaration of love triggers something in him, too. And when she sees her face flicker and lose its happiness as she starts to realise he doesn’t, he hurries to reassure her.

One minute he hates her touching him, next he finds himself gushing ‘I love you, I love you!’ One minute she is clasping his knees in a mad declaration, next she sobers up and realises she is half naked before a stranger, hobbles to her feet and runs upstairs to find him some dry clothes.

She chucks them downstairs, he strips, towels himself in front of the fire, and dresses in her brothers’ clothes, smiling at the result. He sees the time (6pm) and realises he needs to go back to work. He calls up the stairs and she straightaway appears, now dressed in completely formal lady’s wear, a big dress of black voile.

And they act like shy strangers to each other. To calm her he repeats that he loves her but she bursts out that she is horrible, horrible, he can’t possibly, and his reassurances become more extreme, telling her he wants to marry her! Tomorrow if possible!

‘I feel awful. I feel awful. I feel I’m horrible to you.’
‘No, I want you, I want you,’ was all he answered, blindly, with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her.

Strange, weird, uncanny, impenetrably different and hard to parse because at two removes. Lawrence is difficult and strange, but then the social conventions of the day are almost incomprehensible to us nowadays. Would the Edwardian audience have thought it a bit odd or breaking taboos but still essentially comprehensible? To me it seems wildly over the top but it’s precisely its psychological weirdness which makes it so compelling.

I think this is the only one of the stories which doesn’t mention the war at all.

10. Fanny And Annie

Fanny is:

a lady’s maid, thirty years old, come back to marry her first-love, a foundry worker: after having kept him dangling, off and on, for a dozen years. Why had she come back? Did she love him? No. She didn’t pretend to. She had loved her brilliant and ambitious cousin, who had jilted her, and who had died. She had had other affairs which had come to nothing. So here she was, come back suddenly to marry her first-love, who had waited—or remained single—all these years.

The foundry worker is called Harry Goodall. He is a fair-haired fellow of thirty-two, easy going and popular but with absolutely no drive or ambition.

Harry meets her off the train and the whole scene is lit up by flames from the giant foundry. He can’t even afford a dog cart but carries her bags by hand. Word can’t express how depressed she is to be back in this dump.

Harry carries her bags all the way to her aunt’s place, a little sweet-shop in a side street. Her aunt knows her well for a tall, proud woman. She knows she thinks herself way above Harry’s class and Harry knows it too. She, also, married a man beneath her and that night weeps for her niece’s fate.

Next day Fanny has to endure the ordeal of visiting Harry’s domineering, coarse mother, Mrs Goodall, matriarch of four boys and a vixen of a daughter, Jinny.

Harry has a fine singing voice, a tenor, but is a joke on the choir circuit because he cannot pronounce his h’s. Fanny goes to the church that Sunday, her heart sinking seeing the same old vicar, hearing the same old hymns. Harry is a handsome man but marrying him means being dragged back down into the common people. It feels like a doom.

In the middle of Harry’s singing, a notorious local character – Mrs Nixon, who is know to beat her feeble husband – she stands up and denounces Harry as ‘a scamp as won’t take the consequences of what he’s done’ – which I take to mean that Harry has had sex with her but then dumped her. Mrs Nixon describes Fanny as his ‘new fancy woman’, implying that she’s the latest in a long line. Fanny goes bright red. Harry looks down in amusement. There’s a pregnant pause and then the vicar stands up to announce the final hymn.

After church the congregation leaves, Mrs Nixon staring them all out, till it’s just Harry, Fanny and the vicar. The vicar comes and apologises to Fanny. Harry comes down from the choir stalls and when the vicar asks him what it’s all about, he readily admits it’s Mrs Nixon’s youngest daughter, Annie. She’s in the family way. Harry says she’s gone to the bad and is always in and out of the pubs with the fellers. Now she’s with child and claiming it’s Harry’s. When the vicar asks whether it is his, Harry replies ‘It’s no more mine than it is some other chap’s.’ Is he confessing that has slept with young Annie?

Fanny and Harry walk the long mile back towards his house in silence. At one point is the turning off to her aunt’s place. It crosses her mind that she could take it, go to stay, walk away from this whole Harry business. But ‘some obstinacy’ makes her turn with him towards the Goodall household. It’s packed with the entire clan, ma and da and all the siblings with their spouses and they’ve all heard about the scandal at the church.

The thing is, as the clan all chip in with their stories about awful Mrs Nixon and how she’s emasculated her husband, how she beat her daughters and made them bathe in a tin bath outside in the freezing cold, and as they devour a big tea of sardines and tinned salmon and tinned peaches, besides tarts and cakes, all this has the effect of making Fanny feel at home. Her warming to the big friendly supportive clan is dramatically indicated when the others prepare to set off for chapel that evening. Fanny says she (understandably) doesn’t want to go but then goes on to say:

‘I’m not going tonight,’ said Fanny abruptly. And there was a sudden halt in the family. ‘I’ll stop with you tonight, Mother,’ she added.
‘Best you had, my gel,’ said Mrs. Goodall, flattered and assured.

She’s reverted. She’s gone native. She’s been tamed. She realises she wants to be part of the clan. And it’s taken her fiancé’s infidelity, not to make her jealous or set her moralising, but to make her remember the warmth provided by such a large, extended Midlands family which, by implication, is all that she’d been missing in all those years as a fine lady’s maid. Now she’s back home, reabsorbed into her roots. It’s marvellously done.

Credit

‘England, My England’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in the UK in 1924 by Martin Secker, having been first published in the USA in 1922. References are to the 1966 Penguin paperback edition.

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Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence (1920)

‘I do think,’ he said, ‘that the world is only held together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people — a bond. And the immediate bond is between man and woman.’
(Rupert Birkin, sounding like his creator, Women in Love, page 169)

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’
(More Birkin wisdom)

‘One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free.’
(Gudrun, voicing Lawrence’s fundamental position)

‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ are not so much novels as overwhelming, mind-blowing experiences.

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which would have been as long as War and Peace. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works of 500 or so pages each. In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the official banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel, in fact Lawrence had trouble placing it until the American publisher Martin Secker brought it out, in a privately subscribed edition, in 1920.

‘The Rainbow’ is a masterpiece at least in part because the first half describes the lives of farmers in their part of the West Midlands in a kind of timeless, elemental style, making the figures almost like mythical figures who live close to the land, and this legendary power is carried over into the more modern, mundane life of the final figure in the novel, Ursula Brangwen, who carries echoes and shades of the murky ancestors with her.

‘Women in Love’, by contrast, starts in the recognisable modern world of cars and collieries, trains and trams and work, making its lead figures, the two oldest Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, thoroughly modern women, at home in the world of universities, art school, managers, cities, trains, London and Paris. So it lacks the mythical depth and resonance of the first novel.

It starts some years after ‘The Rainbow’ ends because Ursula has been teaching at Willey Green grammar school ‘for some years’ (p.9), whereas she hadn’t started that job at the end of ‘The Rainbow’, and Gudrun is back from three years art school in London, whereas she hadn’t left in ‘The Rainbow’.

Ursula is 26, Gudrun is 25. They are wondering what to do with their lives and the novel opens with them having a half-hearted conversation about marriage.

They decide to visit a wedding they know is taking place that morning. The walk to the church through the ugly industrial town places them class-wise, because they have to walk through working class miners’ areas where the miners’ wives stare at the pair in their bright fashionable clothes, and children shout abuse. They are both a class above their setting.

The wedding introduces us to three more key characters: firstly to the two young men the sisters fancy, being:

Gerald Crich who Gudrun passionately fancies. He is heir to the local mining business, a commanding man and presence – ‘fair, good-looking, healthy, with a great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost happy appearance’.

Rupert Birkin who Ursula fancies:

She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole… If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven.

Rupert is one of the school-inspectors of the county.

What’s a little surprising about both these men is we aren’t shown the girls first meeting them, bumping into them again, getting to know them and so on. The novel opens with both girls fully committed to their crushes on both men.

The third character is the dashing, fashionable, tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face, named Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches.

She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old school, she was a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

And:

a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair slipping to her eyes.

The plot revolves around an apparently endless number of meetings, conversations and debates between these five central characters.

Lawrence’s hyperbole

A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness.

As with ‘The Rainbow’, the characters’ feelings are portrayed as evanescent, ever-changing and, crucially, extreme. They flash from one extreme to another even as we watch:

Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.

Or cohabit in extremes of contradiction.

A wonderful tenderness burned in him, at the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the same time he was full of rage and callousness. (p.346)

She could not believe—she did not believe. Yet she believed, triumphantly (p.372)

Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! (p.493)

The simplest argument can lead to characters hating each other.

He could feel violent waves of hatred and loathing of all he said, coming out of her. It was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness. (p.116)

Some event or conversation leaves a character so tortured she wants to die. Hermione listens to Birkin explaining why he’s copying the design of a Chinese vase and her reaction is way over the top:

She suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her unmoved. She strayed out, pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse… (p.99)

Ursula bursts into tears and doesn’t know whether from joy or misery. Rupert and Gerald sometimes love, sometimes hate, sometimes admire and sometimes despise each other, neither of them, nor the reader, can predict their ever-changing moods.

‘Gerald,’ Birkin said, ‘I rather hate you.’
‘I know you do,’ said Gerald.

Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it. (p.231)

Hermione loves Birkin but at the same time:

She hated him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer dissolution like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of dissolution that was taking place within her, body and soul.

In fact the Italian Contessa staying with Hermione, explicitly points this out after dinner:

‘Look,’ said the Contessa, in Italian. ‘He is not a man, he is a chameleon, a creature of change.’ (p.103)

Nobody has any control over their feelings. Nobody has the smooth detachment, the stiff upper lip, the gift for under-statement which was supposed to characterise the English. Lawrence’s metier is over-statement. I noticed early on that the most recurring emotion is fear.

If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with misgiving.

This kind of hyperbole occurs on every page.

Suddenly [Ursula] started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the face of a man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It startled her terribly. She thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish.

Sometimes she [Ursula] had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this.

Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.

Hermione and Ursula look at some luxury shirts but when Hermione comes near her, Ursula panics:

Hermione came near, and her bosom writhed, and Ursula was for a moment blank with panic. And for a moment Hermione’s haggard eyes saw the fear on the face of the other… overcome with dread… (p.104)

Why? Because this is how all Lawrence’s characters feel, constantly overwhelmed, falling into panics or despairs, tortured by the never-ending intensity of their feelings.

There are other feelings, lots of them, I just noticed how often fear dominated. One of the few criticisms I’d make of Lawrence is I dislike it when this hyperbole makes him use the word ‘insane’. He does mean feeling something to an extent which is almost deranged but use of the word makes me draw up short, and realise how preposterous he’s being.

The result was a nasty and insane scene with Halliday on the fourth evening.

Why not just say ‘The result was a nasty scene with Halliday on the fourth evening’? Most of Lawrence’s hyperbole I can take, but his references to insanity and madness grated.

The book’s worldview

By chapter 4 I began to realise that every chapter (more or less) contains at its core an argument, two or more characters getting into a debate about something or other. Characters in other novels have conversations which move the plot along, but in Lawrence – certainly in this book – very often they start talking purely in order to have a 6th form debate about a Big Issue. The five central characters are all very opinionated and at the drop of a hat start arguing.

The fundamental premise of Lawrence’s worldview seems to be that God is dead and so people have to make their own values, figure out how to live their own lives. The God is dead premise is obviously key but only made explicit once, by Birkin, the Lawrence avatar.

‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (p.64)

Part of the statement’s impact is its throwaway nature. In the later nineteenth century hundreds of novels and autobiographies featured Great Debates about the existence of God or the devil, the protagonists’ agonising about their Loss of Faith etc. But here, around 1915, is Lawrence simply dismissing all of that. It’s a non-subject. Junk. Thus freed, we have to get on with living our best lives.

Mind you, Birkin goes quite a long way beyond a sensible atheist humanism. Lawrence gives him extreme views, regularly positing the end of humanity. With characteristically Lawrentian contempt, he wonders if humanity’s time has come? It would be a good thing.

Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: ‘Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away — time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.’

An opinion which is repeated right at the end of the novel. But this is just one character’s opinion, Birkin, the most negative of the quartet: ‘His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.’ (p.66)

Gerald’s worldview is less vivid and memorable because he lives it; he is the embodiment of masculinity, virile and in control, a manifesto in action. It’s easy to quote Birkin as if he represents Lawrence’s view, but really the book’s worldview is generated by the dialectic between Birkin the gloomy theoriser and Gerald the confident man of action; and that’s before you bring in Ursula, Gudrun and Hermione, who all contribute to its complex weft of opinions. The difference between a lecture or manifesto, and a work of art, is complexity and ambiguity.

Chapter 1. Sisters

Introducing Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, sitting chatting about whether they’ll ever get married before they set off walking through their ugly industrial town to see an actual wedding. This features the two men they fancy, coalmine owner Gerald Crich and county school inspector Rupert Birkin. The groom is late and there’s an odd moment when he arrives, sees, his bride on the path to the church, and then makes a mad dash to try and beat her to the door.

Chapter 2. Shortlands

The wedding reception is held at the Criches’ family home, Shortlands, where we see Gerald confidently hosting the party (his father retires ill) and see him and Birkin interacting with guests, notably the breezily confident Hermione Roddice. Gerald, Rupert and Hermione have a three-way argument about race and nationality:

‘Do you think race corresponds with nationality?’ she asked musingly…

Chapter 3. Class-room

Ursula at work teaching children about the structure of catkins. She is startled by the arrival of Birkin and then, unexpectedly, Hermione. Hermione and Birkin have an argument, she saying education makes children too conscious and stops them behaving spontaneously.

‘Isn’t the mind—’ she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?’
‘Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’ he said brutally.
‘Are you sure?’ she cried. ‘It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.’
‘Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,’ he cried.

So far, every chapter has featured a kind of central debate or argument. I wonder if this is the pattern for the book.

Chapter 4. Diver

Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the local lake, Willey Water, come to a lake and see a naked man run off a jetty and dive in. It is confident Gerald. They’re both jealous of men’s freedom.

‘God, what it is to be a man!’ [Gudrun] cried.
‘What?’ exclaimed Ursula in surprise.
‘The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. ‘You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’

Ursula tells Gudrun the terrible story of Gerald accidentally shooting his brother dead with a rusty old gun when they were boys. Then they comes across Hermione out for a walk with Laura. After Hermione greets, converses a bit then wanders off, Gudrun says how much she admires her, but Ursula is dead set against her.

The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other. (p.56)

The sisters jokily tell each other that they are a thousand times more intelligent and beautiful than Hermione, let alone the masses in the street.

‘Strut,’ said Ursula. ‘One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.’
‘Exactly,’ cried Gudrun, ‘a swan among geese.’

Chapter 5. In the Train

Birkin has to go to London by train. On the platform he bumps into Crich and they’re more or less obliged to travel together. As in every preceding chapter there is a debate. Gerald has been reading a newspaper leader which argues that ‘there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin’. This triggers Birkin to say all such announcing of plans is just playing; what we need to do is tear up society, starting by tearing up ourselves. Lawrence’s characters’ opinions are always vehement but often don’t really make sense:

‘We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers.’ (p.60)

Disappointingly this morphs into Birkin asserting that the meaning of life is love, that he wants the finality of a definitive love.

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’

It’s on this journey that Birkin expresses his dislike of people and his contentment if all of humanity were wiped out, quoted above.

He tells Gerald he stays with a man in Soho, Halliday, and mixes with a Bohemian crowd. Interesting to read how little the profile of this type has changed in the last hundred years:

‘Painters, musicians, writers – hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say.’

The most significant changes would be that nowadays such a crowd would be 1) diverse and multicultural and 2) LGBTQ+ and gender fluid.

Chapter 6. Crème de Menthe

Later the same day Gerald meets Rupert in a Bohemian cafe. The latter is chatting to Minette (Minny) Darrington, small, bobbed hair, with a lisp, nicknamed ‘the Pussum’.

Her ex-boyfriend, Halliday, an old Etonian, turns up. He chucked her and told her to go to the countryside when he learned that she’s pregnant but she refuses. Others join the table, Maxim Libidnikov and Julius who Lawrence has Minette rather unnecessarily tell us is a Jew.

Gerald is more and more attracted to her wanton behaviour and sits pressed up against her in the taxi they get to Halliday’s house (the flat where Birkin bunks down when in London) where they are surprised by the illiterate Arab servant he’s taken in off the streets. Bohemia, darling.

Chapter 7. Totem

Next morning in the same apartment, Gerald wakes up. Going into the main room he is surprised to find Halliday and Maxim naked in front of the fire. Bohemia. Rubert has his bath and, after he’s followed, Gerald adopts the manners of the house and comes out naked. He goes into the bedroom where he obviously slept with Minette. Her eyes are chaotic. She is like ‘a violated slave’ which arouses Gerald all over again but he realises he has to separate himself from her.

They go about their business for the day, and all reassemble to go to a music hall that evening, then back to Halliday’s flat. Gerald hangs on for two more days but the group become more fractious until Halliday provokes Gerald one evening and Gerald is on the verge of punching his face in before he turns and leaves.

Thus Minette achieves her aim, which was to make Halliday jealous and make him love her again and, hopefully, get him to marry her. This she has achieved by the time Gerald leaves.

Chapter 8. Breadalby

Breadalby was a Georgian house with Corinthian pillars, standing among the softer, greener hills of Derbyshire, not far from Cromford. It is Hermione Roddice’s family home, set in landscaped ground. She invites Ursula and Gudrun to stay. Also staying are Birkin, a young Italian Contessa, young athletic-looking Miss Bradley, Sir Joshua, a dry Baronet of fifty, and a woman secretary, a Fräulein März, young and slim and pretty. Later arrive Hermione’s brother, tall debonaire Alexander Roddice, a Liberal MP, who arrives along with Gerald Crich.

Edwardian lunch presented by servants under the lovely old elm tree in the garden while the characters witter about education. Tea and a walk round the grounds. Hermione loves Birkin but realises that he’s come to hate her and a break is coming.

Gorgeous dinner with all the ladies wearing fashionable dress. Followed the staging of an impromptu ballet in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky, the servants bringing down Hermione’s gorgeous Oriental costumes, Alexander playing the piano.

Next morning they go skinny dipping in the ponds in the grounds, except Ursula and Gudrun and Birkin. Gerald gets his kit off at the drop of a hat. He knows how handsome and male he looks. After lunch a discussion about whether the old social values have collapsed in which case, what news ones are emerging? Gerald thinks people should and will be defined by the role in society, their job. Their private lives will remain private. Birkin objects that there is no social equality. Birkin feels people are as different and self sufficient as stars.

Later, he goes to Hermione’s boudoir, feeling he had been rude. He sits quietly and reads while she writes letters but in fact she is flooded by a vast wave of hatred, suddenly she realises Birkin is standing in her way and only eliminating him can she be free. So she takes a lapis lazuli paperweight and cracks it down on his skull with all her might. Fortunately her fingers get in the way masking a lot of the blow. She raises it again but Birkin ducks under his book and crabs out of the room.

Instead of going looking for medical help he walks out of the house across the grounds and into a wood where he strips naked and rolls in the grass and flowers then walks through a young pine wood deliberately letting the needles sting him, experiencing an epiphany of the post-human world. Is he mad? Who cares.

He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

Eventually, dressed again, he staggers to the railway station and catches a train home where he is laid up in bed with concussion.

Chapter 9. Coal-dust

Two scenes. In the first Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the coalminers’ town, are delayed at a closed level crossing while a long train shunts by and up rides Gerald Crich on a horse, a beautiful mare, which panics at the very loud noise of the clanging carts and rears and bucks and terrifies the sisters while Gerald enjoys mastering the poor terrified beast.

The second half describes Gudrun’s addiction to walking the working class colliers quarters, especially in Friday night when they get paid and get pissed in the pubs. She pairs off with an electrician named Palmer, a fairly educated man, they promenade, go to the movies, but are never really an item.

Chapter 10. Sketch-book

The sisters go to a remote part of Willey Water to sketch. Who should appear but a rowing boat rowed by Gerald containing Hermione. Domineering Hermione asks to have a look at Gudrun’s sketchbook but bickers with Gerald and the book falls into the lake, Gerald reaching out and into the water to retrieve it. Hermione makes a dramatic show of being sorry, while Gudrun wants the book back, and Gerald a) despises Hermione b) is taken with Gudrun’s pride. And this incident establishes a link between them. it establishes Gudrun’s ascendancy over Gerald.

Chapter 11. An Island

Meanwhile Ursula has wandered along a stream which feeds the lake up to a big mill pond where she finds Birkin trying to fix a punt. Only leaking a little the punt bears him and Ursula out to a muddy little island. Here Birkin lets rip with his nihilistic misanthropy.

‘I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of mortal lies.’
‘So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?’ said Ursula.
‘I should indeed.’
‘And the world empty of people?’
‘Yes truly.’

Ursula stands up for the importance of love (alas) while Birkin rudely dismisses it as just another human emotion, appropriate in some situations not in others. She starts to dislike and even to hate him, ‘priggish and detestable’.

Birkin says he’s renting rooms at the mill which is empty. If he could he’d chuck in his job (school inspector) and live there by himself like a hermit, away from the mankind he loathes so much. Hermione’s threatened to furnish the rooms for him. He tells Ursula it’s over between him and Hermione, not that there was anything anyway. Ursula tells him she hates Hermione anyway.

Chapter 12. Carpeting

Still at the mill they find Gerald and Hermione in the building itself. Hermione offers to help Birkin measure the rooms and then offers him a valuable carpet which he tries to reject. He hates being dominated and owned by her. Neither of them mention her attacking him with the paperweight.

The landlady of the mill, Mrs Salmon, makes tea for them all. Over tea Ursula brings up Gerald’s beastly behaviour to the mare at the level crossing which triggers a debate about whether animals have lives of their own or exist solely to serve human purposes.

Birkin comes in with the idea that horses have two wills, one which wants to submit utterly to man, another which rebels and wants to be completely free. Not uncontroversially, he goes on to say the same about women.

Hermione and Ursula wander of while the men bicker about horses, and agree that they both dislike Birkin’s anatomising and botanising, he’s always opening and dissecting rather than leave life be.

Chapter 13. Mino

The Mino is Birkin’s cat. Following their ‘clicking’ at the watermill, Ursula goes to visit Birkin at his flat. They almost immediately start arguing. Birkin insists he doesn’t believe in love but in something much deeper, in penetrating to your essential self and making a primeval bond with another essential self.

The argument is interrupted when Birkin’s tom cat goes through the French windows into the garden to confront a wild she-cat and cuffs her. Ursula yells at it to stop being a bully but Birkin sympathises with his cat’s wish to create a stability.

‘It is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding rapport with the single male. Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of chaos.’

Back in their flat, they carry on their argument, Birkin demanding something far beyond love, Ursula unable to see it and saying he’s being obstinate and obtuse. Eventually she wins, beating him down and getting him to say ‘I love you’ in the classic style, embracing and kissing her.

Chapter 14. Water-party

The Criches hold a big midsummer party on the lake, with a motor launch and some rowing boats, all sporting lights and lanterns, the launch letting off fireworks, people laughing aboard the boats or strolling through the grounds or sitting in groups. The water side of things is being hosted by manly Gerald.

Ursula and Gudrun attend, walking there with their mother and father (Will and Anna from The Rainbow). They are intimidated by all these strangers and ask Gerald for a hamper and a canoe and paddle far away from the crowds. They beach it in a hidden spot, strip off and skinny dip, finally emerging, drying themselves. Then Ursula sings while Gudrun performs a eurhythmic dance.

Ursula interrupts this by pointing out some cattle have approached but undaunted Gudrun confronts them, dancing, outfaces them and makes them run off. At this point Gerald and Rupert appear, having tracked them down. Gerald and Gudrun go up the hillside in pursuit of the cattle leaving Ursula and Rupert to fall deeper in love.

Up the hill Gerald tells Gudrun that it’s dangerous to drive the Highland bullocks, she says ‘I suppose you think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t you?’, Gerald asks her ‘why’ and, for answer, she hit him round the face. These passionate Bohemians.

Back at the lakeside the quartet clamber into two dinghies to head back and are laughing and joking when they hear shouts across the water. It’s quite dark now and someone has fallen overboard the launch. Gerald makes Gudrun row fast to the place, the skipper of the launch tells him about where the girl went overboard. She was followed by her young doctor boyfriend who jumped in to save her. Gerald strips down and jumps into the freezing water.

In brief, he dives again and again till he’s exhausted but can’t find them. Birkin pulls him out and rows him to the jetty, where he can barely stand. Gerald apologises to his father who’s appeared, and orders Birkin to drain the lake. So Rupert sets off with Ursula to the lock-keeper’s cottage where he gets the key to the sluices and laboriously opens them, releasing the lakes water into overflow channels. Slowly the levels sink.

Walking back, Birkin explains to Ursula his odd ideas about death, about needing to escape this life, slough it off like an old shell etc.

Unexpectedly in the middle of the road he stops and gives her exquisitely gentle and sensitive bunny kisses. A bit further down the road, not to be outdone, she pulls him towards her and gives him more traditional passionate kisses. They both experience an efflorescence of lust.

Then she goes home and Birkin goes back to the lake to find Gerald still supervising the search and the scouring of the water. He says he can’t sleep till they find the bodies which they eventually do. The young woman, Diana Crich, had panicked and thrown her arms round the boy’s neck so tight it choked him, and so they both drowned.

A page describes how, on that Sunday morning, word spreads throughout the colliery community and all the working class men, women and children are abuzz with the tragedy, imagining the feelings of the people at Shortlands, ‘the high home of the district.’

Chapter 15. Sunday Evening

All that day and into the evening Ursula waits for Birkin to come. She is now fully in love with him. But he doesn’t and as dusk comes she sinks into a deep depression, really deep, page after page thinking about dying and death and what comes after death, thus:

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness of death.

Eventually, at the children’s bedtime, he arrives, coming in out of the rain. He helps Ursula get a few of the younger children ready for bed. Then her mum and dad return from church. She is furious with him and gets into an argument about him neglecting his body, making it poorly (i.e. neglecting the battery by Hermione). When he finally leaves she is overcome by hatred of him. See what I mean by Lawrence characters veering from burning love to virulent hatred, from snogging Birkin on Sunday morning to hating his guts by Sunday night.

When he was gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life.

Chapter 16. Man to Man

Birkin has a recurrence of illness. He lies in bed which allows Lawrence to give him a great fantasia of wild thoughts. Birkin hates lots of things. He hates the idea of married love, ‘horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction’. He hates sex because it is so limiting, it makes the sexes dependent on each other. He hates women’s need:

always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant.

In the ideology of love and sex men and women are considered fragments who can only be made whole by the other. Birkin dreams of a world where men and women are always whole and voluntarily associate as entirely whole.

Gerald comes to visit. The death of the young couple triggers a discussion about death, about the impact on Gerald’s family, then on whether the youngest daughter, Winifred, should be sent away to school.

Both men feel such a closeness that Birkin, bubbling with silly ideas, suggests they swear Blutbruderschaft like the old German knights used to, to swear to love each other all their lives. The novel is titled ‘Women in Love’ but the complicated love between Birkin and Gerald is just as central.

Birkin floats the idea of Gudrun being hired as a private tutor to young Winifred. Aha.

Chapter 17. The Industrial Magnate

After experiencing such closeness, Gerald now fades out of Gudrun’s mind. She dreams of getting away from England. She writes to friends in Munich and Petersburg to see if they could help or put her up.

Ursula and Gudrun visit a working woman who makes honey, ‘Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and cat-like beneath.’

Mrs Kirk was also a wet nurse to the Crich children and remembers what a little devil Gerald was. Any normal person might find this sweet and funny but Gudrun, with Lawrentian melodrama, has a fit, is overcome with rage, and wants the woman ‘ taken out at once and strangled’. Sometimes you feel like telling Lawrence’s characters to calm down, take a breath, count to 10 and everything will be better. But there’s no point. Everything about his world is ramped up to maximum. The spectacular insights into complex human nature, the moments of intense feeling, as well as the staggering nature poetry, all are part of the same package.

Up at Shortlands Mr Crich the patriarch, Thomas Crich, is slowly dying and Lawrence describes his retreat from the world and his own life. He had always treated his workers well, considering them as superior to him, closer to God. But in this had to fight his wife, Christiana, ‘like one of the great demons of hell’. Specifically, he encourages the poor to come and claim charity while Christiana, filled with hatred, drives them away like a witch. Something like hatred and terror exists between them (!)

The dying father’s last thoughts are to secure the wellbeing of Winifred, his youngest, favourite child, several pages on her wilful, anarchistic character. Meanwhile, as his father dies, Gerald feels more and more exposed. He’s managed the business well with his father as mentor and protector. Once he’s gone, Gerald will be fully exposed. We learn what wasn’t obvious up to now, which is that the last few months have changed Gerald: under the influence of 1) the death of Diana 2) Birkin’s visions and 3) Gudrun’s love he’s ceased to be a mechanical old Tory, doors have opened in his mind, he’s become confused.

The chapter goes back to describe Gerald’s boyhood, education, wanderlust, off to uni in Germany, serving in the war, exploring in the Amazon, before returning to take up the family business. He sees the world as instrumental to the will of man. This is the exact opposite of Birkin, who fantasises about nature freed by the complete extermination of man.

Man was the archgod of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man’s will was the absolute, the only absolute. (p.251)

Lawrence describes industrial strife, the colliers striking for more pay which led to lockouts which led to marches, riots, and soldiers being sent to the most troublesome pit, Whatmore, shots fired, a miner shot dead. This broke old Man Crich’s heart but excited Gerald, who was a boy.

In brief: as Gerald takes over the business he reforms it from top to bottom, sacking all the old managers, bringing in new professionals and equipment from America, scrapping all the perks and charities his father had introduced, overhauling it and making it a modern profitable business.

Lawrence presents it in moralising, general terms, as the triumph of the modern machine ethic over the old organic one. The triumph of Gerald’s heartless Fordian mechanical efficiency over his dying father’s old-fashioned Christian Victorian paternalism.

Chapter 18. Rabbit

Mr Crich agrees for Gudrun to come to Shortlands regularly as an art tutor for Winifred. The latter expects her to be yet another servant but quickly learns they are to be equals. They sketch Einnie’s Pekinese dog, Looloo. Gerald turns up after a few days and they realise they are both in love. The strange incident of them getting out the family’s huge pet rabbit from its hutch. It’s called Bismarck and is a monster, going into a frenzy wherein it badly scratches both Gudrun and Gerald before they get it to a courtyard with grass where it settles down to feed.

Chapter 19. Moony

Birkin goes to recuperate in the South of France leaving Ursula bereft.

She despised and detested the whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people.

She takes a walk up to the mill pond as night is falling and sees the big moon reflected in the water. Then it is smashed by someone throwing a stone in, and another, repeatedly breaking the moon into fragments. It is, of course, Birkin, who has come back without telling anyone.

She makes themselves known and they have a hell of an argument because she simply wants him to say I love you while he has a difficult-to-understand, rarefied theory of two people existing together without needy things like ‘I love you’ etc, he wants ‘the paradisal unknowing’. He mocks it as her war cry.

But then she reaches out her hand to his and their bodies take over. They kiss again and again and Birkin gives in and says ‘I love you’.

Next day Birkin has doubts about his entire attitude. It’s connected with a 2-page meditation on the truth revealed by the African sculptures in Halliday’s flat, some truth cold northerners have reached. Suddenly he knows he must propose to Ursula so goes to Beldover. She’s out so he explains his intentions to her father, Will Brangwen.

This goes badly. While they wait, Brangwen and Birkin get into an argument. Brangwen has raised his children Christian like him and doesn’t want to see the girls throw themselves away. Birkin is nettled by all of this. When Ursula arrives from the library it’s her father who tells her Birkin is there to propose, reducing Birkin to inaudible mumbling. This inauspicious manner leads Ursula to bridle and then accuse them both of trying to railroad her, at which Birkin gets up and leaves.

Over the next few days Ursula and Gudrun are very close and dissect Birkin’s character, a preacher. But then there’s a reaction against her sister and she finds herself pondering what kind of love she wants from Birkin.

She wanted unspeakable intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down—ah, like a life-draught… But only on condition that he, her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon.

This is a central crux so worth lingering on:

She believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was more than love, or than any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was everything.

Birkin has a model of the self where love is one among many attributes which bring out and complete the self. For Ursula, love is bigger than all individuals and we must submit ourselves to it.

Chapter 20. Gladiatorial

The famous chapter describing Rupert and Gerald wrestling in front of the fire. Straight after walking out of Ursula’s house after the proposal fiasco, Birkin walks up to Shortlands, to find Gerald standing in front of the fire in his drawing room, bored to tears.

They get talking about how to alleviate boredom: there’s work, intoxicants, women or… Birkin suggests fighting. Gerald says he shared a house with a Japanese wrestling expert in Heidelberg and offers to show Birkin jiu-jitsu. So Gerald gets the butler to bring sandwiches and soda, to close the door and leave them undisturbed.

And so they strip naked and wrestle. Modern sensibilities look for the homoerotic in the scene, which may well be there, but Lawrence is primarily concerned with the spiritual or psychological aspects. The actual wrestling lasts just four paragraphs. In the fifth one Gerald lies back on the carpet exhausted, faints and Birkin passes out over his body. When Birkin comes to, he props himself up and his hand accidentally touches Gerald’s, who seizes it. A strong male clasp. Gerald asks if this was the Bruderschaft Birkin wanted. It’s certainly something.

They get dressed (Gerald nips upstairs to dress in a luxury dressing gown) before settling in front of the fire to eat the sandwiches the butler brought. Birkin tells him he came hotfoot from proposing to Ursula. He loves her. Which triggers them to discuss the nature of love and for Gerald to worry that he might never find it.

Chapter 21. Threshold

Gudrun goes to London to attend a show of her artwork. On her return Winifred has a bouquet for her. Gudrun goes to sit with the dying old man. He arranges for a stable to be converted into a studio for Winifred and Gudrun to work in.

Birkin arrives driving his car to collect Winifred, Gudrun and Gerald. The two latter sit in the back and ripely satirise Birkin’s ideas about an association of man and woman which leaves them separate and distinct, as stars. Gudrun and Gerald agree they want passionate love between committed partners. (Gudrun gives her opinion of marriage being a purely social form – ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love’ – which I imagine was shocking in the late 1910s.)

Chapter 22. Woman to Woman

Only at this point do we learn Birkin was driving Gerald to the railway station, then taking the other two on to his place for tea before disappearing off somewhere. Hermione turns up and she and Ursula have a long dissection of Birkin’s character, Hermione strongly advising Ursula not to marry him.

Like the rabbit in his chapter, the star of this one is Rupert’s cat which Hermione feeds cream and speaks to in Italian. Hermione is of that class of gentlewoman who know Italy, and Florence in particular, so exquisitely well. Her dear mama died in Florence. (Cf A Room with a View.)

Chapter 23. Excurse

Next day is a half holiday at the school so Birkin calls by in his car and takes Ursula for a spin. He hands her a tissue which turns out to be full of rings he’s giving her. But this has the unintended consequence of making her feel like she’s being bought, making her very angry and she launches into pages and pages criticising him, calling him a perverse death-eater (p.346) before getting him to stop the car, throwing the rings at him, getting out and walking off. He stoops to pick the rings out of the mud and acknowledges some of her criticisms are true.

Then she comes back. She asks for the rings again. Everything which made the fight, disappears and now they are both soppily in love and do lots of kissing. Get back in the car and drive to Southwell, home of Southwell Minster and have a grand high tea at The Saracens Head. Here, in a scene which would be easy to over-interpret, she kneels on the hearth

And she was drawn to him strangely, as in a spell. Kneeling on the hearth-rug before him, she put her arms round his loins, and put her face against his thigh. Riches! Riches! She was overwhelmed with a sense of a heavenful of riches.
‘We love each other,’ she said in delight.
‘More than that,’ he answered, looking down at her with his glimmering, easy face.
Unconsciously, with her sensitive fingertips, she was tracing the back of his thighs, following some mysterious life-flow there. She had discovered something, something more than wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It was the strange mystery of his life-motion, there, at the back of the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of his being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight downflow of the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the sons of God such as were in the beginning of the world, not a man, something other, something more.

There’s more than a page of her kneeling and tracing the outline of his loins and feeling his primal power. Very easy to give a sexual interpretation to. Utterly entranced, he decides they must both quit their jobs and travel. In a mad enthusiasm they both write letters to their bosses quitting with immediate notice. Birkin posts hers first so they don’t arrive at the same time. I smell trouble.

Then back into the car and touring the lanes absolutely transformed by total love. He feels like an Egyptian Pharaoh. They end up driving through Sherwood Forest, then stop at a circle of grass near a stream. It is darkest night. He throws down a rug, they strip off and make love, the first sex in the book, described in high mystical magical terms.

She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness. (p.361)

Chapter 24. Death and Love

Old Thomas Crich is a long time a-dying. And the impact on his son, Gerald? Characteristically Lawrentian hyperbole.

Day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.

He takes to hanging round the studio watching Gudrun. One day he asks her to stay on into the evening for dinner. As he explains how he is suffering, the void his father’s illness makes him feel, she feels powerfully attracted. A strong soldierly type obviously suffering brings out the mothering instinct.

Interlude when Gerald’s cold mother comes down, tells him not to take it all on himself, then departs. Gerald insists on walking Gudrun down the drive to the gates. He puts his arms round her and draws her near and she melts. Under the railway bridge, where the colliers snog their sweethearts, they kiss:

So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant. Her arms were round his neck, he kissed her and held her perfectly suspended, she was all slack and flowing into him, and he was the firm, strong cup that receives the wine of her life…

But then she checks herself, as all women do; you don’t want to be thought ‘too easy of winning’.

How much more of him was there to know? Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body. Ah, her hands were eager, greedy for knowledge. But for the present it was enough, enough, as much as her soul could bear. (p.375)

Gudrun doesn’t come next day because she has a cold. The day after, Gerald is sitting by his father’s bed when the old man gasps and arches and coughs up a gout of blood and dies. The mother makes a weird speech, telling her children none of them must look so beautiful and young on their deathbeds. Next day Gudrun goes to Winifred and the studio where Gerald pays a meek visit and shares their coffee.

The funeral is barely described. Instead the three horrible days when Gerald feels like a prisoner chained over an abyss of darkness. On the third evening he can’t bear it any more and goes for a vast walk in the darkness, which eventually brings him to the graveyard where his father’s grave is, and then he conceives a mad notion of seeing Gudrun. She is the only one who can save him.

So he asks directions from a drunk miner emerging from the town pub at chucking-out time (10pm) and makes his way to the Brangwen house. In a coincidence he arrives just as Birkin and Ursula step out, and hides from them in the shadows. Then he sneaks into the house – father William is asleep in the living room, his wife is in their bedroom – sneaks on tiptoe upstairs. There’s a comic digression when he figures he has the right room, sneaks over to the bedroom only to find the sleeping form of a boy, one of the brothers and has to tiptoe back out onto the landing.

Long story short, he finds Gudrun’s bedroom, wakes her. At first terrified, she locks her door, makes him take off his wet things and lets him have sex with her. He falls deeply asleep, as men do, while she lays for hours in the dark wondering what has just happened, what it means, remembering all her life up to this point.

She waits till the church bell rings 5 o’clock, then wakes him and urges him to go. In fact she has a nausea of him, needs him to be gone.

Chapter 25. Marriage or Not

Birkin has taken out a marriage licence but Ursula keeps delaying. She is in the third week of notice to the school. Christmas is coming. Gerald jokes that maybe he and Gudrun should hurry up so they can make it a joint wedding. Birkin isn’t sure marriage will suit Gerald.

Gerald and Birkin compare theories of marriage. For Birkin it is a social convention which denotes the partnership of free and equal lovers. Gerald has a more fatal view.

Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. (p.398)

Chapter 26. A Chair

Birkin and Ursula go to the flea market. They buy a beautiful old wooden chair but then argue about whether the present is accursed (Birkin) or the past was just as crudely materialistic (Ursula). This triggers Birkin into expressing Lawrence’s dogma of never having a home, of permanent travel.

‘The truth is, we don’t want things at all,’ he replied. ‘The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.’
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied:
‘So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.’
‘Not somewhere – anywhere,’ he said. “One should just live anywhere – not have a definite place. I don’t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is complete, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a commandment-stone… You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.’

Ursula had earlier noticed a working class couple, the woman heavily pregnant, sifting through the junk on display. On an impulse she decides to give them the chair they’ve just bought. Lawrence dwells on the pair’s working class appearance, the woman short and stocky, the man thin like a rat. The repeated word is ‘slinking’. In fact this is the longest description of working class people in the book. Gerald takes direction from a drunk miner. Working class women mock Ursula and Gudrun on their way to the wedding. There are the servants, of course. This is the longest description of proles and the key words are ‘slinking’ and ‘rat’.

Our couple find the whole place grim and miserable and low and wretched, ‘cold, somehow small, crowded, and like the end of the world.’ They catch a tram and agree that they need to get away, to wander the world.

‘And we will wander about on the face of the earth,” he said, “and we’ll look at the world beyond just this bit.’ (p.408)

Chapter 27. Flitting

At dinner, Ursula tells her family she’s getting married tomorrow. Her father is furious at not being told, not being given any notice. She says it’s her life, he says she owes her family and her parents the information. She defies him, makes him furious and he smacks her. She leaves the room, goes upstairs, packs her bags, comes downstairs, says goodbye, marches out of the house, down to the station, catches a train to where Birkin is staying, walks past his landlady into his room. (Birkin appears to be living in rented rooms as well as sometimes at the Mill which Hermione so wanted to decorate for him, thus retaining her hold over him.)

Rupert is non-plussed but reckons something like this was inevitable, embraces her and tells her he loves her. That is the reassurance she needs, but she can’t really see how deeply she is rescuing him from the fallen world, from his own doubts and incompleteness. They marry the next day (p.417). The wedding ceremony is not described in the slightest because it doesn’t matter to Rupert, Gudrun or Lawrence.

A few days at the Mill, while Rupert is away, Gerald and Ursula discuss marriage. He says she looks well on it. He asks her whether he should propose to Gudrun. They both have their doubts. Later when Rupert comes home, they agree that Gudrun is more the mistress type than the wife type, and Gerald a born lover rather than faithful husband. But Gerald floats the idea that they should all go away somewhere, somewhere abroad, as a foursome, which Ursula loves.

The Brangwen family have moved out of the house in Beldover. Will Brangwen needed to move to Nottingham for his work. They leave Ursula’s belongings behind for her to collect. She and Ursula walk over one afternoon. They’re both appalled by how bleak the empty house is. Birkin shows up with his car and shares the general horror at the bleak empty rooms.

Birkin drives Ursula back to the Mill with him, dropping Gudrun at the cottage she’s now renting in Willey Green. She watches them go, haunted by their happiness. Next day she goes to the Mill and finds Ursula alone, asks if she doesn’t think Gerald’s suggestion they all go away together is a cheek. Gudrun thinks the menfolk are treating her like a chattel, like a type (French for ‘trollop’).

Chapter 28. Gudrun in the Pompadour

The trip abroad begins. Gudrun and Gerald, being ready first, set off via London and Paris to Innsbruck, where they would meet Ursula and Birkin. In London they stayed one night. They went to the music-hall, and afterwards to the Pompadour Café. Gudrun hates this place because all the tight little groups of artists and bohemians hang out here.

Minette is there, the girl from chapter 6 who was pregnant and slept with Gerald in order to get back her target, Halliday. She comes over from a group of the gang and asks him to join them but he suavely refuses. She says just enough to indicate to Gudrun that she’s one of his mistresses.

The bohemian set (Halliday, Maxim, Julian and Minette) start slagging off Birkin, then Halliday finds a letter to him written by Rupert, full of his ripest pontificating, and reads it out loud to general ridicule. Gudrun is worked into a frenzy by their mockery, gets up, walks over to their table, politely asks if she may read the letter, takes it, turns and walks out of the cafe. The others can’t believe what is happening then start to boo. This makes her walk all the slower and more superior. Outside she hails a cab as Gerald catches up with her, thinking her magnificent. Gudrun thinks they are ‘dogs’ and calls Rupert a fool ‘to give himself away to such canaille.’

(According to Anthony Burgess’s biography of Lawrence, this scene is closely based on fact. The setting was the Café Royal where Lawrence’s enemy Philip Heseltine, started reading out Lawrence’s poems from the volume Amore in a mocking voice, and so infuriated Katherine Mansfield that she snatched the book out of his hands and stormed out, followed by her embarrassed husband, John Middleton Murray, Burgess page 97.)

Chapter 29. Continental

By far the longest chapter, 60 pages long, almost a novella.

Description of Birkin and Ursula’s voyage across the Channel, curled up in the prow of the ship in the absolute darkness. They disembark in Ostend by night. In a dream they take their bags through customs to the railway station, grab a sandwich and horrible coffee (nothing changes) then onto the train which travels through Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, through Luxembourg, through Alsace-Lorraine, through Metz, arriving at Basle. Overnight in a hotel, then another train to Zürich and then their final destination, Innsbruck.

They catch an open sleigh to the hotel where they see Gudrun. Ursula and Gudrun go to her hotel room to gossip, talking about mutual friends in Paris. Then everyone dresses and comes down for dinner where they agree how wonderful it is to be out of England, a country with the damper permanently on.

Next morning they take a small train to Hohenhausen, up in the snow, and then take sledges higher, higher into the snowy mountains, arriving at another, more remote hotel. In the hotel room, Gudrun is overcome, looking out the window at the snowy landscape and mountains she cries and Gerald embraces her.

They go down for coffee and cake, delicious. There are ten other guests, all German. They are introduced to the group who are listening to an odd man-child give a performance of the Cologne accent. When he’s finished Ursula is invited to sing the song, Annie Lowrie, with Gudrun accompanying her on the piano.

After dinner Ursula wants to go out into the darkness. She is intoxicated by the wonderful cold and the primal scenery. When they return to the hotel lounge, the Reunionsaal, they discover the other guests dancing the Schuhplatteln, the Tyrolese dance of the clapping hands and tossing the partner in the air at the crisis, with jumping and clapping, to the music of three zithers.

To no-one’s surprise, Gerald quickly learns the steps and becomes a demon. He dances with the Professor’s youngest daughter who is incandescent with awe at this Real Man holding and twirling her. Gudrun is lusted after by one of the young men who is to shy to ask to dance with her. Twas ever thus.

In their bedroom, Gudrun has a panic attack about Gerald, is completely alienated from him. Luckily he doesn’t notice. She mocks his dancing with the young girl, he doesn’t understand her. They sleep separately and she wakes superior to him. Looking at him asleep, she realises he can solve any practical problem, all challenges fall before his will. She imagines marrying him, supporting him as he becomes a Conservative MP, goes into politics, becomes Prime Minister.

But then she mocks her own girlish dreams. Who cares about politics? It’s all so old. And somehow, through this interior monologue, she becomes convinced to marry him. She wakes him with kisses, telling him he’s convinced her and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow. (p.473)

Loerke

One day they’re snowed in. Gudrun and Ursula get to know Loerke, the puny little sculptor, who tells them his backstory, a broken home and deprived background, hitching to Italy, learning to sculpt the hard way. Now he is a professional with well-paid commissions and is working on a frieze in granite for a new factory in Germany. He gives an impassioned defence of art beautifying new industrial buildings that has a Bauhaus ring. Anyway, it puts Gudrun’s funny little clay models in the shade.

Lawrence’s antisemitism

Gerald and Rupert both dislike Loerke and the girls’ interest in him. Birkin, as always the most virulent and malicious, gives an extended slagging of Loerke which ends up with an unexpected, unnecessary and dismaying antisemitism. I could leave it at that but I’ll quote the entire passage so you can see for yourself the vehemence of Lawrence’s dislike and racism.

‘What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?’ Gerald asked.
‘God alone knows,’ replied Birkin, ‘unless it’s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.’
Gerald looked up in surprise.
‘Does he make an appeal to them?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Birkin. ‘He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.’
‘Funny they should rush to that,’ said Gerald.
‘Makes one mad, too,’ said Birkin. ‘But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.’
Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
‘What do women want, at the bottom?’ he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.’
Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind today, horribly blind.
‘And what is the end?’ he asked.
Birkin shook his head.
‘I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke, he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.’
‘Yes, but stages further in what?’ cried Gerald, irritated.
Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.
‘Stages further in social hatred,’ he said. ‘He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.’
‘Probably,’ said Gerald.
‘He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.’
‘But why does anybody care about him?’ cried Gerald.
‘Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.’ (p.481)

Not a good look, as the Yanks say.

So Loerke is also a sculptor. As she looks at his pieces and hears his stories, Gudrun is beguiled. Loerke shows them a photo of a sculpture of a young girl sitting on a horse. Ursula says the horse is oddly distorted which triggers a little harangue.

‘It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.’ (p.484)

They all have different reactions. Gudrun agrees on the difference between the artist and the work, but Ursula insists the horse and the girl are reflections of the artist’s horrible personality. Gerald strolls up, takes a look at the photo and, characteristically, says he likes the look of the girl, Gudrun saying ‘wouldn’t he just’. But in a further development, when Loerke tells them the girl was an art student Gudrun immediately leaps to the conclusion that she was a naive and innocent young girl from a good family exploited and used by her wicked male teacher. #metoo. The sisterhood. As outraged by masculine abuse in 1920 as 2020.

But there’s more. Loerke freely admits he had to regularly smack and hit the girl before she’d sit still in this pose. And then, to make himself even more despicable, says that he only likes his models young:

‘I don’t like them any bigger, any older. Then they are beautiful, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen – after that, they are no use to me.’

Furious, Ursula goes out into the snowy night and suddenly realises she hates it. Five pages back, they were all snow gods and snow artists, now, with Lawrentian abruptness, she’s shifted to the other extreme. She wants to go south to warmth and olive groves. She goes back into the hotel and finds Birkin in their room, reading and tells him. He laughingly agrees.

Next day they tell the other couple and can tell Gerald and Gudrun are relieved to hear of their departure. The men have been riling each other a bit. The two genders have last meetings. When Ursula explains that she and Birkin want to continue moving on, into new freedoms, Gudrun irritates her by saying that wherever you go you’ll always be with the same person, ‘only to secure oneself in one’s illusions.’

The men chat and Birkin asks Gerald when he’ll leave and Gerald replies maybe never. Maybe he’ll never go back to England. The sledge arrives, picks up Birkin and Ursula and off they go, leaving Gerald and Gudrun dwindling in the snow, waving.

Chapter 30. Snowed Up

The second longest chapter at 38 pages. Taken together, the two ‘abroad’ chapters make about 100 pages.

Left to themselves, Gudrun and Gerald fall into a fierce and bitter war for supremacy. They rage and argue. She moves into a separate bedroom. They fight all the time. She begs him to tell her he loves her. He feels like he has been ripped open. He has fantasies of murdering her. They both go mad.

While Gerald’s off skiing, Gudrun become friendlier with Loerke over their shared aesthetic, particularly the basic principle that the artist and the art exist in different realms.

The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality.

One time Gerald is bullying Loerke in argument like an arrogant Englishman and when Loerke turns to her for appeal, she angrily tells him to stop calling her Mrs Crich. She is not Mrs Crich. She is not married. A light goes on in Loerke’s eye and Gerald is mortified.

Perversely he is so self contained about this insult that she loves him and goes to his bedroom that night to have sex, gladly. ‘And she had extreme pleasure of him.’ But she withholds her soul. Any couple eventually reach the end of fleshly pleasure and everything is just repetition. Gudrun unconsciously knows that the next step, for her, is alliance with Loerke. Loerke is very patient and encourages long conversations about Mozart and Goethe et al, to win her over.

She and Gerald have a massive argument when Gerald asks her what on earth she sees in Loerke and she bluntly tells him the little German understands women and is not a fool. Stunned, Gerald asks if that is the end of their relationship. She says either of them are free to leave at any time. For some reason the bluntness of all this arouses Gerald, she sees it, is disgusted, and walks out.

And so on. After a long campaign Loerke subtly suggests that she might go with him to his studio in Dresden. Not to be his mistress. But because he admires her company and her intelligence. She is flattered though a little chagrined that he doesn’t flatter her beauty.

Gerald is out all day skiing, feeling king of the mountains up in the high slopes. He doesn’t want to come back to the hotel and people. As soon as he sees Gudrun he fantasises about murdering her, the sheer pleasure of strangling the life out of her. They dine and later, in his room, she says the experiment is over. They gave it a try and it failed. Why, he asks. Because you cannot love, and I could never love you.

At this Gerald feels the pure desire to kill go down his arms and into his hands and turns towards he but, sensing his rage, she nips out the room, across to hers and locks the door. Cue pages of her pondering her whole life and above all the patheticness of men, of Gerald, Birkin, all of them, of the mining business with all its managers. Babies, all of them. And the sheer tedium of doing the same thing day after day. Gerald stays up all night reading, mortally afraid of lying sleepless in the dark.

Next morning over breakfast she announces she’ll be leaving the following day. Gerald says he’ll make the necessary arrangements then goes out for a day’s skiing. Gudrun feels wonderfully empowered. The long vigil and pondering her life situation has clarified everything. She lets Loerke take her out tobogganing even though he looks like a ridiculous pixie. He doesn’t take the tobogganing very seriously which she finds an immense relief from Gerald’s intense seriousness about all activities. Lightness and irony are what she needs.

At the end of the day he crashes them in the snow, laughing, then produces a coffee thermos, some Schnapps and biscuits. They are merrily discussing where Gudrun will go the next day – she doesn’t know and doesn’t care – when Gerald looms whitely up out of the snow.

Crack! Gerald punches Loerke aside, then punches him again. Gudrun brings her fist down on his face and chest which prompts him to turn and, finally, fulfil his deepest wish, to strangle her to death. His hands grip her throat and strangle the life out of her as she thrashes and then starts to go limp which is the moment when Loerke comes to himself and makes one of his sarcastic remarks, in French: ‘Monsieur! Quand vous aurez fini –’ ‘Sir, when you have quite finished…’ and the mockery of it brings Gerald back to his senses.

Not in horror, but futility. What is he doing? Who cares if this silly woman lives or dies? Oh what’s the point? And he drops Gudrun, looks round in a daze, then stumbles off into the snow. He has had enough. He wants to sleep. He wants it to end. He climbs higher and higher into the land of sheer cliffs and rockslides. He slips in a snowslide but that doesn’t wake his daze. Onwards and upwards. He comes across a crucifix almost buried in the snow and is overcome with terror that he is going to be murdered, looking all round him in his fear, raising his arm to ward off the blow. And thus walking he slips over the edge of a deep bowl,

surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of the mountain. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep. (p.533)

Chapter 31. Exeunt

Gerald died. They bring the body back to the hotel. Next morning they bring the body back to the hotel. A woman comes to tell Gudrun. She is amazed by how cold and unaffected she is. Like Mersault and his mother. She finds Loerke in the main room but he is not pleased to see her. She telegrams to Birkin and Ursula who arrive the next day but she is cold with them. In fact after five minutes the sisters have nothing to say to each other.

The final pages focus on Birkin. He makes all the practical arrangements and deals with the authorities. He visits the frozen corpse then treks up the hill to the snowy bowl where Gerald dies, then comes back to the hotel and confronts the corpse again. This time he breaks down in hysterical tears, and Ursula sees him. Birkin is distraught that Gerald didn’t love him. He says he offered him his love but he didn’t take it. He remembers their hands clutching each other as they came round from the famous wrestling scene. If only that moment had lasted, if only Gerald had loved him, maybe he would still be alive.

Birkin and Ursula and one of Gerald’s brothers accompany the body back to England where the family insists he be buried. Ursula and Birkin remove to the Mill and live very quietly. (Gudrun has gone to Dresden and ‘writes no particulars of herself.’)

On the last pages of this vast book, Ursula and Birkin argue. She says, Aren’t I enough for you and he says, No. You are all women to me but I wanted something more, I wanted a male kind of love, I wanted one true friend, and I had him but he rejected me. Ursula says she doesn’t believe Birkin’s notion of an eternal love between men, ‘It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity’ and he replies ‘I don’t believe that’ and that’s the end of the book.

A war novel?

Lawrence rewrote the novel to achieve its final form, between 1915 and 1917, the central years of the First World War. In his foreword to the American edition, he said he wanted to the timeline of the novel to be unfixed. But critics at the time and ever since have pointed out the tremendous bitterness observable in many of the characters – most extreme in Birkin’s visions of exterminating humanity altogether – radiate the bitterness and anger and disillusionment which Lawrence was hardly the only one to experience during these years. If Birkin repeatedly express this, it is Gerald who in a sense acts it out, overcome with psychopathy at the novel’s bitter end. And the carrying of the body of a young Englishman, killed abroad, back to his home in England was, of course, something experienced by hundreds of thousands of families.

Lawrence at one point considered titling the book Dies Irae, Days of Anger.

Flouting conventional morality

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’
‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (Chapter 5, on the train to London)

Just to note the obvious:

1. None of the characters seem to believe in God, Christian teaching or Christian morality. The girls’ father, William, tells Birkin he expects it of his daughters, but nobody else even mentions it.

2. None of the quartet are bothered by pre-marital sex in the slightest. There’s nothing about sin, hell and damnation, nothing at all. It’s assessed solely on whether it is right for the individual and their relationship i.e. the ‘modern’ view.

3. Even marriage, which they all enter into, none of them really care about much. It’s a purely social convention which cements what has already been agreed between free individuals.

GUDRUN: ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love.’ (Chapter 21)

BIRKIN: ‘I’m not interested in legal marriage, one way or another. It’s a mere question of convenience.’ (p.396)

In fact Birkin has a violent objection to traditional ideas of marriage.

‘Marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Égoïsme à deux is nothing to it. It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy—it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.’ (p.397)

In fact, you can easily misread him to be attacking the institution of marriage which, of course, for conservatives then and now, was sacred:

‘You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the additional perfect relationship between man and man – additional to marriage.’
‘I can never see how they can be the same,’ said Gerald.
‘Not the same – but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.’ (p.397)

4. And experimentation. Why not go whole hog? Here’s Gudrun fired up by the wild dancing in the Reunionsaal at the Tyrolese inn:

They might do as they liked – this she realised as she went to sleep. How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What was degrading? Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different reality. And he [Birkin] was so unabashed and unrestrained. Wasn’t it rather horrible, a man who could be so soulful and spiritual, now to be so – she balked at her own thoughts and memories: then she added – so bestial? So bestial, they two! – so degraded! She winced. But after all, why not? She exulted as well. Why not be bestial, and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful thing she had not experienced. Yet she was unabashed, she was herself. Why not? She was free when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied her. (p.464)

You can see how old-fashioned moralists and social guardians would be outraged. For all these reasons Lawrence couldn’t find a publisher for the book in the UK and when it was, finally, published in the US, in 1920, it was to subscribers only. Such was the threat and illegality of what to us now appear completely harmless, indeed anodyne, opinions.

Summary of people and places

Ursula Brangwen

26, class teacher at Willey Green Grammar School. Always a bit flustered, always rushing in too soon. Greenish eyes. Pairs with Rupert Birkin. Favourite phrase: why not? which drives her father mad.

Gudrun Brangwen

25, artist and model. Dark hair. In London at art school she got to know the extended networks of Bohemia. The more conventionally beautiful of the two. Calm and confident on top, profoundly restless underneath. Ursula’s nickname for her is ‘Prune’. Pairs with Gerald Crich.

Rupert Birkin

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’ (p.230)

School inspector. Tall, thin, tired misanthrope. Wishes all humanity could be exterminated. Prophet of individualism (someone should write a book comparing Wilde and Lawrence as proponents of unflinching absolute individualism.) An inveterate lecturer and preacher:

‘He isn’t sympathetic, he wants to dictate.’ (p.367)

Here’s Maxim slagging him off in chapter 27:

‘He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man.’ (p.433)

An emotional chameleon, ‘he is so changeable and unsure of himself’ or, as Ursula puts it late on:

‘He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally – I really don’t know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of himself to be mated – physically – not the human being. You see he says one thing one day, and another the next – and he always contradicts himself – ‘
‘And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,’ said Hermione slowly. (p.330)

Rupert is generally agreed to be a self portrait by Lawrence in which case he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings. Here’s Hermione dissecting him:

‘He is so uncertain, so unstable — he wearies, and then reacts. I couldn’t tell you what his reactions are. I couldn’t tell you the agony of them. That which he affirms and loves one day — a little latter he turns on it in a fury of destruction. He is never constant, always this awful, dreadful reaction. Always the quick change from good to bad, bad to good.’ (p.332)

At the start of the novel Birkin is going out with Hermione, under her thumb. Takes a long time to shake her off. The growing attraction between him and Ursula entails prolonged rivalry between Ursula and Hermione. After much arguing they finally surrender to each other and, on page 360, have sex in Sherwood Forest.

Gerald always feels a bit superior and protective towards him, thinks him ‘amazingly clever, but incurably innocent’. They stay in the London Soho flat together. They wrestle naked together (chapter 20).

Gerald Crich

31, coalmine owner, superb physical specimen, fair hair and moustache, blue eyes. His ‘gleaming blondness.’ Imperious, ‘very good-looking and self-contained.’ Former officer in the Army till he resigned his commission. Explored the Amazon so occasionally tells stories about the Indians. Compelled to become head of the family coalmining business as his father falls ill, Gerald clings onto his boyhood dreams of being Odysseus. In his imagination:

The world was really a wilderness where one hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a condition of savage freedom.

Tries to quell the mare he’s riding as the colliery train goes by, to Ursula and Gudrun’s horror. Wrestles naked with Rupert in front of the library fire (chapter 20).

Hermione Roddice

A friend of the Criches, ‘a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face.’ Upper class and used to dismissing people when she’s lost interest. Flat bosom. Long, grave, downward-looking face. Heavy, drugged, shadowy eyelids. Grey eyes. Her musing sing-song voice. Needs to dominate men: ‘It was always the same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male being.’ (p.337)

The book starts with her going out with her partnered with Birkin, who is restless to escape her domination but it takes half the book for him to become free enough to commit to Ursula.

Beldover

The small colliery town in the Midlands where the Brangwen family live. Gudrun, fresh back from living in London, is repelled by its ‘amorphous ugliness’, the high street ‘part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid,’, ‘the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street’, ‘this shapeless, barren ugliness’, ‘the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside’. In chapter 9 Lawrence gives a vivid depiction:

This was the world of powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery, cold and iron.

And the party atmosphere on Friday nights:

It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw a ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the pale abstract faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.

Gudrun perceives Gerald as ‘her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers.’

Shortlands

Home of the Crich family. ‘It was a long, low old house, a sort of manor farm, that spread along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow little lake of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping meadow that might be a park, because of the large, solitary trees that stood here and there, across the water of the narrow lake, at the wooded hill that successfully hid the colliery valley beyond, but did not quite hide the rising smoke. Nevertheless, the scene was rural and picturesque, very peaceful…’

‘The panting and rattling of the coal mines could always be heard at Shortlands…’ (p.249) The drive is a mile long. ‘The dark drive that ran between close-cut hedges through sloping meadows’ (p.370).

Willey Water

‘The narrow little lake of Willey Water’, where Diana Crich and her lover drown at the annual water party (Chapter 14).

Based on real people

Publication of ‘Women in Love’ was delayed not only because publishers feared prosecution under the obscenity laws which ‘The Rainbow’ fell foul of, but also because of the threats of libel actions by people who thought they had been included and, generally, mocked in the novel.

1. In the version we read, the young woman Gerald sleeps with in Soho is named Minette. She was originally named ‘the Pussum’. This was because the Lawrence’s friend, Philip Heseltine (who appears as Halliday) had a mistress who was nicknamed the Puma’. Changing her name to Minette, and a payment of £50, staved off a libel case.

(Anthony Burgess’s entertaining biography of Lawrence tells us that Heseltine was very young when he came into Lawrence’s orbit. Under the name Peter Warlock he was to become a noted writer of classical songs. Coincidentally, he died in the same year as Lawrence, 1930.)

2. More important was Lady Ottoline Morrell who was furious that the rather pompous, opinionated and superior character of Hermione Roddice was based on her.

a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

Hermione’s country house, Breadalby, is Lady Ottoline’s Oxford house, Garsington Manor, transplanted to Derbyshire. Not only her aloofness and cloying clinging to Birkin, but the scene where she attacks him with a paperweight, intending to kill him… No wonder she threatened to sue.

3. One of her lunch parties features ‘a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh, horse-laugh’. This is Bertrand Russell.

4. The notion of a quartet of two couples might be based on the attempt by Lawrence and Frieda to live in a joint household in Cornwall with the writers, John Middleton Murray and Katherine Mansfield. Murray is nothing like Gerald but Mansfield does have some similarities with Gudrun, an artist expert at working in miniatures, her loyalty: and also the fact that she was unfaithful to Murray, having an affair with the artist Mark Gertler who was, apparently, partly the basis for Loerke, both being German-Jewish.

5. Thomas Crich, owner and patriarch of the coalmine, is clearly modelled on Thomas Barber of Barber Walker Company in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, whose mines Lawrence’s father, Arthur, worked in.

Reviews

Anthony Burgess tells us the novel was met with review headlines including ‘A Book The Police Should Ban’ and ‘Loathsome Study of Sex Depravity Leading Youth to Unspeakable Disaster’ (Burgess, page 101). The stupidity, imaginative incapacity, and the obsession with sex in the crudest, most literal sense remain signs of the philistine mind to this day.

The rationale of Lawrence’s travels

At several points Birkin reiterates Lawrence’s own view about ‘settling down’ in a ‘nice little home’, namely that it’s death of the soul.

‘One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home.’ (p.397)

So as soon as the war was over and he was able to leave wretched little England, Lawrence was off!

Credit

‘Women in Love’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1921 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1970 reprint of the 1960 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on February 5, 2025

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The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence (1915)

A flame kindled round him, making his experience passionate and glowing, burningly real.
(description of Will Brangwen falling in love, although it could be almost any Lawrence character, male or female)

What did the self, the form of life matter? Only the living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body, rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no further complication.
(Ursula’s credo right at the end of the book, p.484)

This strikes me as a work of utter genius. Lawrence had an astounding gift for creating men and women who are more like pagan gods of the landscape, who live what seem primeval lives of extraordinary depth and intensity.

Other novelists build their narrative out of key scenes, scenes which move the story along or reveal people’s personalities, create way stations to the plot or highlight characters’ development. Many novelists work through extensive dialogue, designed to disclose people’s (clashing) personalities, sometimes to announce shocking revelations, as in a stage play or, alternatively, to be witty and amusing. Lawrence is extremely unlike all of that. This novel amounts almost to a repudiation of that entire tradition.

Instead, with relatively few well-defined scenes and tens of pages passing with no dialogue at all, Lawrence describes the inner lives of his characters at great length, to intense and penetrating depth, in rhapsodic poetic prose. At one point he gives a sense of what he’s about, in the perception of the newly-married Tom Brangwen:

He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams, the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away… leaving here exposed the inside, the reality: one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent bedrock… (p.150)

He does so not in a rational, analytical way. Instead there are page after page describing the complex, many-sided and continually changing quality of his characters. Their moods, emotions, feelings and qualities are described with incandescent vividness and they are always changing, sometimes paragraph to paragraph, sometimes sentence to sentence, in a dizzying, bewildering shimmer. Is this how people’s perceptions, moods and feelings change? It feels rather delirious and yet wonderful at the same time. Here are young Anna and Will falling in love.

A spell was cast over her. And how uneasy her parents were, as she went about the house unnoticing, not noticing them, moving in a spell as if she were invisible to them. She was invisible to them. It made them angry. Yet they had to submit. She went about absorbed, obscured for a while. Over him too the darkness of obscurity settled. He seemed to be hidden in a tense, electric darkness, in which his soul, his life was intensely active, but without his aid or attention. His mind was obscured.

(Note the repetition. I’ll come to that in a moment.) Or Ursula wanting to be back in love with Anton.

When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For, oh, she wanted to love him. Stronger than life or death was her craving to be able to love him.

Hundreds and hundreds of pages of characters keyed up to the most intense and exquisite emotional peaks and extremities.

Passion

‘The Rainbow’ follows three successive generations of the Brangwen family who inhabit and inherit the family farm, Marsh Farm, in rural Nottinghamshire, from the 1840s to the Edwardian era. But there is little or nothing about business dealings, the practical details of raising crops or cattle and so on.

Instead the book focuses in huge detail on two types of subject: first the childhood and adolescence of the key figure in each generation; but then, most particularly, on the love lives of these figures, described with astonishing, monomaniacal intensity. Here is just one among many, many such passages, in this case describing Ann and Will falling in love, in this scene embracing and kissing.

They would stand sometimes folded together in the barn, in silence. Then to her, as she felt his young, tense figure with her hands, the bliss was intolerable, intolerable the sense that she possessed him. For his body was so keen and wonderful, it was the only reality in her world. In her world, there was this one tense, vivid body of a man, and then many other shadowy men, all unreal. In him, she touched the centre of reality. And they were together, he and she, at the heart of the secret. How she clutched him to her, his body the central body of all life. Out of the rock of his form the very fountain of life flowed. But to him, she was a flame that consumed him. The flame flowed up his limbs, flowed through him, till he was consumed, till he existed only as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her.

Lawrence’s characters are continually being swept out into the spaces between the stars, bursting into flames, swooping cruel as a hawk, and generally being transported by stark, primeval, unstoppable passions. At numerous points the impassioned couples imagine themselves transported far from ‘civilisation’, like beings on a desert island, like Adam and Eve. At one point Lawrence makes this more than usually clear.

And yet, for his own part, for his private being, Brangwen felt that the whole of the man’s world was exterior and extraneous to his own real life with Anna. Sweep away the whole monstrous superstructure of the world of to-day, cities and industries and civilization, leave only the bare earth with plants growing and waters running, and he would not mind, so long as he were whole, had Anna and the child and the new, strange certainty in his soul. Then, if he were naked, he would find clothing somewhere, he would make a shelter and bring food to his wife. (p.193)7

Male and female created He them

He asserted himself before her, he felt himself infinitely male and infinitely irresistible, she asserted herself before him, she knew herself infinitely desirable, and hence infinitely strong. And after all, what could either of them get from such a passion but a sense of his or of her own maximum self, in contradistinction to all the rest of life? (p.302)

Above all, this enormous 500-page hymn to the life of the passions and emotions focuses on what, in Lawrence’s hands, is the primal dyad, duality and dichotomy between a man and a woman in love. Thousands of other writers have handled this worn-out subject but Lawrence does it unlike anyone else. Other novelists structure their stories through scenes, which generally include dialogue in which characters reveal their feelings, and the scenes are carefully calibrated to depict men and women going through the fairly well-recognised stages of acquaintance, friendship, admiration, affection, first feelings of love and so on. Think Jane Austen. Above all they have a social aspect and their characters conform to social norms.

Not so Lawrence. Lawrence works through page after page of prose poetry describing the characters’ feelings in the most primal, extreme, almost abstract way, sometimes with the simple profundity of the Old Testament.

She liked Anthony… All her life, at intervals, she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses. (p.417)

His characters are like protagonists in a kind of Wagnerian drama of souls, endlessly battling for fulfilment.

She became proud and erect, like a flower, putting itself forth in its proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His beauty of form, which seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people, made her proud. It was like deference to her, and made her feel as if she represented before him all the grace and flower of humanity. She was no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order. All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality? (p.444)

Very often the drama rotates around ideas of completion. Male and female both feel a lack and want to be made complete and, once married, finally achieve this wonderful sense of completion, and yet all kinds of things can knock it sideways, create barriers, can make them hate each other, and brood and be distant, but then something snaps, one or the other begs forgiveness, there is joyful reunion and completeness again.

It was begun now, this passion, and must go on, the passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and so defined against him. She could limit and define herself against him, the male, she could be her maximum self, female, oh female, triumphant for one moment in exquisite assertion against the male, in supreme contradistinction to the male.

Something Lawrence does again and again is give each gender successive paragraphs – a paragraph to how the man is feeling, a paragraph to the woman. It’s one of the many ways he creates this sense of a primal male-female opposition or dyad.

He was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.

But she was complete in herself, and he was ashamed of his need, his helpless need of her. His need, and his shame of need, weighed on him like a madness. Yet still he was quiet and gentle, in reverence of her conception, and because she was with child by him.

Sex

As that passage implies, there is a very strong sexual undertone to all this. For most of the book Lawrence nowhere explicitly describes sex, even when the couple are alone in their house, even alone in their bedroom, the language is never specific about undressing, boobs and willies and so on, it always remains at this level of abstract nouns, of ‘need’ and ‘completion’ and ‘union’ and suchlike.

But sex, heterosexual sex, the loss of self in the union of bodies making love, obviously underpins a great deal of the book’s psychology and, maybe, it’s aesthetic, its constant search for a kind of primitive intensity and physical communion between male and female.

At one point Will, a Christian, takes his wife Anna, a sceptic, to visit Lincoln cathedral. As he enters the soaring building he undergoes a great soaring of the soul but, as you can see, the whole thing is described in very thinly veiled sexual terms.

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated… Every jet of him strained and leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch. (p.202)

More straightforwardly, Will returns from an evening in Nottingham after arguing with Anna, and they approach each other as strangers, which they find more arousing.

She watched him undress as if he were a stranger. Indeed he was a stranger to her. And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he touched her… They abandoned in one motion the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple.

Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect stranger, as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to him, the other half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She waited for his touch as if he were a marauder who had come in, infinitely unknown and desirable to her. And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.

He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling over her. There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that it drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one man’s capacity. (p.235)

Still described in general or euphemistic or categorical terms. Whereas, 25 or so years later, here are Ursula and Anton.

She enjoyed him, she made much of him. She liked to put her fingers on the soft skin of his sides, or on the softness of his back, when he made the muscles hard underneath, the muscles developed very strong through riding; and she had a great thrill of excitement and passion, because of the unimpressible hardness of his body, that was so soft and smooth under her fingers, that came to her with such absolute service. (p.460)

‘With such absolute service,’ what a thrilling phrase. Once they have slept together once, the descriptions of Anton and Ursula become more, not explicit exactly, more frank. More honest, maybe, though still couched in poetic rather than naturalistic details.

He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold. But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast against him.

As you can see, it’s not really the sex, it’s the complete picture of closeness or otherwise between people, which Lawrence is after.

Married love

Tens of thousands of novels, from Jane Austen to Bridget Jones, depict the process of finding a mate, of falling in love, as leading up to the great plot climax of marriage and ending there.

Lawrence is notable for carrying right on into the state of married love, in fact he only really blossoms once a couple are married and the real struggle begins, the struggle for complete physical and spiritual union, which is so overwhelming when achieved and experienced, which obliterates the outside world in its intensity, and yet is so fragile, so easily punctured by the slightest whims of jealousy or irritation or misunderstanding on the part of either spouse. And then the days and nights of alienation and coldness and apartness, sometimes rising to active hatred of the other, before some route is found back to apologise and forgive.

A large amount of the first half of the text is made up by this endless battle of the two sexes, conceived in a kind of elemental abstraction.

Horrible in the extreme were these nocturnal combats, when all the world was asleep, and they two were alone, alone in the world, and repelling each other. It was hardly to be borne. (p.189)

Joy

If there are black moments of hatred and scorn, Lawrence’s work is also, and mostly, coloured by an extraordinary primeval joy. Here’s the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen, left alone during the day while her husband, Will, goes to work in Nottingham.

She had her moments of exaltation still, re-births of old exaltations. As she sat by her bedroom window, watching the steady rain, her spirit was somewhere far off.

She sat in pride and curious pleasure. When there was no one to exult with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play, then one danced before the Unknown.

Suddenly she realized that this was what she wanted to do. Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had chosen her, to Whom she belonged.

She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.

It’s not joy, is it, it’s exultation, and this note of fantastic joy and psycho-physical excitement recurs again and again, the fantastic excitement of being alive!

To Ursula it was wonderful. She felt she was a new being. The darkness seemed to breathe like the sides of some great beast, the haystacks loomed half-revealed, a crowd of them, a dark, fecund lair just behind. Waves of delirious darkness ran through her soul. She wanted to let go. She wanted to reach and be amongst the flashing stars, she wanted to race with her feet and be beyond the confines of this earth. She was mad to be gone. It was as if a hound were straining on the leash, ready to hurl itself after a nameless quarry into the dark. And she was the quarry, and she was also the hound. (p.317)

Aspects of Lawrence’s style

Plain prose

Lawrence doesn’t achieve his effects through fancy vocabulary. It’s striking how ordinary most of his vocabulary is. It’s really the power of his perceptions which startle you. Lydia gets a job caring for an old vicar who keeps a parish by the sea.

Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed in heaven, very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the hill catching the sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass and lichens and a little church, and snowdrops among coarse grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm sunshine.

Repetition within paragraphs

Who knows how conscious it was but Lawrence employs a very definite strategy of repeating two or three key words within each paragraph. Each paragraph has one or two key words which are repeated two or three times. The effect is to make each paragraph feel… feel like it has an identity of its own, stands distinct from its neighbours. Each one seems to be ringing its own bell. Look at the repetition of ‘very’ in the paragraph above. There are thousands of similar and often more striking examples.

It’s as if Lawrence has struck out a phrase encapsulating a perception and then wants to examine it from various sides, repeats the phrase, repeats it with slight variations, to see what happens as he walks round it, to observe the changing light giving it different perspectives.

To pick a paragraph more or less at random: young Anna Brangwen has gone to church accompanied by her cousin, Will Brangwen. They are both sitting in a pew as the service begins. First read it for the sense:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew. (p.110)

And then pick out the repetitions:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew.

It’s not the consciously poetic prose of an Oscar Wilde because it avoids Wilde’s gossamer vocabulary, all silver and emeralds, and instead deliberately uses very plain ordinary language (except, I suppose for luminous, maybe). But the key words are the opposite of recherché – on the, hands, knees, strange. You could hardly get commoner words. Yet this kind of sounding repetition is without doubt poetic in technique and it’s absolutely everywhere, in every single paragraph.

Direct repetition

Generally, the repeated words or short phrases are scattered throughout a paragraph, separated by other phrases. But sometimes he wants to be so emphatic that he just repeats a phrase side by side.

She felt his power persisting on her, till she became aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was forcing her, he was forcing her. (p.181)

Why could he not leave her? Why could he not throw himself into the hidden water to live or die, as might be? He could not, he could not. (p.187)

Hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. (p.322)

Ursula was beside herself. She could not endure till the Saturday came, her thoughts burned up like a fire. If only it were Saturday, if only it were Saturday. (p.339)

On a macro level, certain words or images become associated with certain characters through repetition: foreign and foreignness with Lydia; Tom Brangwen’s blue eyes; flame with Anna; Will the hawk.

Dialect and surprise words

He does, occasionally, deploy dialect, or unusual words, or (colloquial?) phrases, mostly in direct speech.

Will Brangwen had some weeks of holiday after his marriage, so the two took their honeymoon in full hands, alone in their cottage together.

‘Sit you down,’ said Tom Brangwen, ‘an’ take a bit off your length.’

What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man had a young family that needed fettling for? (p.275)

‘Isn’t it a nasty morning,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s not much of weather.’ (p.370)

‘Pens don’t melt into the air: pens are not in the habit of mizzling away into nothing. What has become of them then?’

The main motor of the text is his staggering imagining of people’s primeval lives and feelings; but the proximate cause is his extraordinary sentences. On page 30 or 40 I realised that nearly every sentence comes with an unexpected phrasing which knocks the wind out of you, extraordinary unexpected vividnesses in sentence after sentence, smacking your imagination like a sheet of rain across a lake.

He held her in his arms, and his bones melted. (p.119)

The days went by, they ran on dark-padded feet in silence. (p.120)

The air was all hoary silver. She looked around her. Trees stood vaguely at their distance, as if waiting like heralds, for the signal to approach. In this space of vague crystal her heart seemed like a bell ringing.

Tom Brangwen wanted to make a speech. For the first time in his life, he must spread himself wordily. (p.137)

Lawrence is an astonishing spendthrift of beautiful lines, throwing away hundreds of casually brilliant and inspiring lines.

The firelight glowed against the darkness in the room.

He had worked for many years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were utterances of himself. (p.355)

He seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. (p.443)

And the mood in the build-up to Christmas.

Everywhere was a sense of mystery and rousedness. Everybody was preparing for something.

Nature poetry

The period just before the First World War saw an efflorescence of nature writing, a gaggle of so-so poets jostling to describe what was coming to feel like the disappearing landscapes of rural England. Edward Thomas was probably to emerge as the best of these but he only started writing his magical poetry once the Great War commenced. Anyway, Lawrence describes nature with the same bright vivid intensity he depicts his humans. They’re relatively rare, his straight nature descriptions, but when they occur, they are like the brightest nature photography.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud…

And yet a deep characteristic of Lawrence is that he doesn’t describe nature as an outsider, as a bourgeois tourist, but always relates it to the hard, muddy lives of the farmers he’s depicting. Sparkling nature is embedded in the world of human labour.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud. Then the turnips were pitted and work was slack.

For me, reading the first version of this paragraph without the final sentence lacks something. When you add in those final nine words, the whole rhythm of the paragraph seems complete. Here’s a selection of his nature writing.

Corn harvest came on. One evening they walked out through the farm buildings at nightfall. A large gold moon hung heavily to the grey horizon, trees hovered tall, standing back in the dusk, waiting. (p.121)

The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a dark blue shadow. She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand, along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight. (p.178)

How lovely was the sunshine that loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating aureole, where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew trees as a bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent on the meadows.

The dim blue-and-gold of a hot, sweet autumn saw the close of the corn-harvest. To Ursula, it was as if the world had opened its softest purest flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron. The sky was blue and sweet, the yellow leaves down the lane seemed like free, wandering flowers as they chittered round the feet, making a keen, poignant, almost unbearable music to her heart. And the scents of autumn were like a summer madness to her. She fled away from the little, purple-red button-chrysanthemums like a frightened dryad, the bright yellow little chrysanthemums smelled so strong, her feet seemed to dither in a drunken dance. (p.308)

There was a place where she went trespassing to find the snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening and the winter-darkened meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods an oak tree had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp, golden splinters of wood that were splashed about, the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves pricked unheeding, the drooping still little flowers were without heed. Ursula picked some lovingly, in an ecstasy. The golden chips of wood shone yellow like sunlight, the snowdrops in the twilight were like the first stars of night. And she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to have found her way into such a glimmering dusk, to the intimate little flowers, and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight of the ground.

The plot = four generations of the Brangwen family

The Marsh farm in the valley of the river Erewash, not far from the village of Cossethay in one direction and the town of Ilkeston further away. In the 1840s a canal was built across their land and then a railway on a viaduct.

At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out of two or three indistinct yards. The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand, so that occasionally a man’s figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing horse traversed the sky.

First generation – Alfred Brangwen

Alfred Brangwen of this period married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the ‘Black Horse’. They had four sons and two daughters. The eldest boy ran away to sea and did not come back.

The second boy, Alfred, became a draughtsman in a lace-factory in Nottingham, stifling his native creativity. He married the daughter of a chemist, became something of a snob, in later life took to womanising.

The third son, Frank, became a butcher, at eighteen married a little factory girl, who bore him numerous children. In later life he became a drunk and a bore.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger, remained at home.

Second generation – Tom Brangwen marries Lydia

The story follows the youngest son, Tom Brangwen, from boyhood to manhood. He struggles at school. When he was 17 his father fell and broke his neck, leaving just him, his mother and Effie in the farm. When he was 23 his mother died leaving him and Effie. They quarrel a lot. He takes a corner at the local pub to keep out of the way. Then Effie got married and moved out, leaving Tom with Tilly, the cross-eyed servant girl.

The story describes him having pre-marital sex several times, first time with a prostitute, next time with a girl he meets from a group at the pub, the glory and bewilderment of it. One day he sees a small woman dressed in black shepherding a child, walking the other way up the hill. One thing leads to another and he starts to woo her.

She is Lydia Lensky, of German descent, who married a Polish doctor who got caught up in the Polish Rebellion (spring 1863), was forced to flee, arriving in London (recapped pages 256 to 258). The doctor died and she threw herself upon charities who found her work caring for old single vicars, first one in Yorkshire, now one in Derbyshire.

Tom woos her over months, then one evening carries a bunch of daffodils he’s picked to the vicarage to propose to here. They are married. Account of his winning over Lydia’s feisty young daughter by her deceased doctor husband, Anna Lensky. Lydia bears him a son but Tom always stays closer to Anna.

She [Anna] was, however, only eighteen when a letter came from Mrs Alfred Brangwen, in Nottingham, saying that her son William was coming to Ilkeston to take a place as junior draughtsman, scarcely more than apprentice, in a lace factory. He was twenty years old, and would the Marsh Brangwens be friendly with him.

Will Brangwen, comes to visit and the narrative describes their slowly falling in love, till they are regularly meeting for illicit hugs and kisses in the cowshed. One time father Tom spies them, doesn’t interfere but is upset at the thought of losing his beloved daughter.

Third generation – Anna marries Will Brangwen

Will and Anna marry. It is a very stormy relationship, Anna being independent and headstrong but Will subject to black rages. Tom leases them a cottage of their own, Ivy Cottage.

Tom Brangwen had taken them a cottage at Cossethay, on a twenty-one years’ lease. Will Brangwen’s eyes lit up as he saw it. It was the cottage next the church, with dark yew-trees, very black old trees, along the side of the house and the grassy front garden; a red, squarish cottage with a low slate roof, and low windows. It had a long dairy-scullery, a big flagged kitchen, and a low parlour, that went up one step from the kitchen. There were whitewashed beams across the ceilings, and odd corners with cupboards. Looking out through the windows, there was the grassy garden, the procession of black yew trees down one side, and along the other sides, a red wall with ivy separating the place from the high-road and the churchyard. The old, little church, with its small spire on a square tower, seemed to be looking back at the cottage windows.

Will retains a lifelong interest in Christianity and church architecture, he feels liberated into eternity by it, whereas Anna sees only the finite stone building which feels man-made and cramped next to the wide universe.

Fourth generation – Ursula and Gudrun

Anna bears several children. The first is a daughter, Ursula. Will is still just 22 (p.214) and falls helplessly for this first daughter. Barely a year later another girl, Theresa. Two years later, Gudrun (p.219). Then Catherine. By the time he’s 26, Will has four children. By the time he’s 30, five (p.238).

Anna becomes totally self sufficient in being a mother which drives him to seek fulfilment elsewhere. But after failed attempts to chat up girls in Nottingham, he returns home more ironic and alienated and, paradoxically, this makes him more attractive to Anna, and they embark on a renewed sex life.

(Anna’s father, Ursula’s grandfather, Tom, dies in a flood, when torrential rain bursts the canal bank and floods the Marsh, he being drunk and riding back from a day in town. His son, Tom, works away and so the second son, Alfie, inherits the Marsh.)

Ursula is 8 when her father, Will, sets up woodwork classes in the local church for village boys (p.239). Ursula is conscious of a difference from the poor families in the village and gets into fights. Her parents send her to Nottingham Grammar School where she is thirsty for knowledge but not systematic. As she hits adolescence she undergoes intense religious experiences, though contradictory, rebelling against the literal interpretation of Jesus, wanting a more sensual religious rapture or ecstasy.

She feels hampered by being the eldest in a house full of children, by ‘the perpetual tyranny of young children’.

She’s just short of 16 (‘a slim, smouldering girl, deeply reticent… sensitive in the extreme, always tortured, always affecting a callous indifference’) when young Anton Skrebensky, son of the friend of the Brangwen family’s, turns up, aged 21 and in the army and wonderfully confident and self possessed.

History, breasts, the rest of England

History With the arrival of Ursula something happens: the narrative seems to emerge from a kind of unspecified timelessness, from ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, and into something more like the modern, historical, recorded world. This is signalled by specific historical references: at first the vague one to ‘the Mahdi’, which could derive from a long period, but then the extremely specific one marking the exact start of the (second) Boer War (October 1899) and intermittently chronicles the progress of the war via letters from Anton Skrebensky who serves in it.

Breasts I’ve added ‘breasts’ to this heading for a specific reason. When Lawrence described the previous generations of womenfolk – the woman from Heanor, Lydia Lensky, Anna Brangwen – there was a great deal of Lawrence’s characteristically ripe and florid prose about their love affairs but it was all described in general terms, about completion and fulfilment, even when she clasped his firm body or he pulled her towards him, it’s in a generalised kind of way, very rarely is there a reference to physical particularities (apart from height, body shape, facial features).

My point is that when Ursula arrives, she does so accompanied for the first time by 1) specific historical references and 2) by the word ‘breasts’. We learn that women have, not a vague ‘bosom’ which heaves with passion, but two breasts which are revealed when they strip naked. Ursula strips for her lesbian lover and they both have breasts. Thus the women cease being almost abstract principles of femininity (although they retain all those aspects) but now become real, physical women. You have for the first time real nudity.

The rest of England And the rest of England starts to appear. Up till now, a little over half-way through, the narrative took place in an almost abstract rural background with very limited horizons. The nearby village of Cossethay, the town of Ilkeston on its hill which can be seen from Marsh Farm, those are the borders of the narrative’s world, that is all the country the characters know or need to know.

But with the arrival of Ursula, suddenly we are turfed out of the primal dream of the first half and dumped into contemporary England, the England of economics and coal mines and imperial wars, of politicians in London. It is a shock when Skrebensky’s barracks at Salisbury is mentioned, or the fact that Fred Brangwen’s bride, Laura, attended Salisbury Training College. Naming mundane places in England seems like a crashing come-down after the primal semi-abstract setting of the first half. Even more so when Ursula applies for teaching jobs at Gillingham in Kent or Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey. I’d spent so long in Lawrence World that I’d forgotten such boring and mundane places existed. As with the history and the breasts of naked women, it feels like the narrative emerges from a kind of ahistorical dreamtime into the modern world of real people with physical bodies scrabbling for jobs.

Ursula’s story

Anton goes to war Ursula has a romantic involvement with the dashing son of friends of the family, Anton Skrebensky, but comes to see he is too conventional. By the time he is called on duty to serve in the Boer War (started October 1899) Ursula is over him. He writes a few letters which she loses.

Lesbian Miss Inger She has a schoolgirl crush on her grammar school teacher Miss Winifred Inger, which develops into a lesbian affair. Miss Inger invites her to stay with her at a bungalow with a lake where they go swimming, kiss and appear to have sex. But after a while Ursula comes to find her too ‘hippy’ and ‘clayey’ and stops feeling so intensely. In fact, she manages to marry Winifred off to her Uncle Tom. There’s a vivid portrait of an extended visit to Uncle Tom Brangwen, who is the manager of a horrible modern filthy colliery in the brand new red-brick town of Wiggleston. He explains how the coalminers are like faceless units who have adapted themselves to their horrible work and their horrible homes, They stay for weeks. Uncle Tom is experienced and cynical, he just wants someone to breed with (p.352). One night Miss Inger slips into Ursula’s bed to ask her whether she should accept Tom’s proposal. Coldly, Ursula say yes. Miss Inger goes back to her own bed to cry.

Applying to become a teacher When school ends Ursula is dumped back in the cottage (Yew Cottage) overflowing with kids and babies and hates it. She writes to her headmistress who advises her to become a teacher. She should earn in the region of fifty pounds a year. (Interestingly, her father estimates that, from his work and a private income of Anna’s, he earns about £400 a year. Compare with Margaret and Helen Schlegel, who each have annual unearned income of £600 pa i.e. £1,200 combined.)

Ursula applies through a central agency and receives interested replies from schools in Gillingham, Kingston and Swanwick (p.362). But her father (Will Brangwen), now well entrenched in restoring the church next door, playing the organ and supervising the choir, refuses to let her go as far away as London. Instead he finds a school in the slum quarter of Ilkeston, St. Philip’s Church School in Brinsley Street (p.367).

(Incidentally, 2 years earlier her grandmother, Lydia, had died; seeing as old Tom died in the flood years earlier, Marsh Farm passes to their second son, Uncle Fred and his wife whose marriage Ursula attended with Skrebensky, where she wanted to expose her breasts to the huge moon, p.368.)

Teaching The headmaster, Mr Harby, ‘a short, thick-set, rather common man’ with complete control of the school and its hundreds of boisterous children. She is a hopeless failure at keeping discipline and standards with her 55 (!) small children. The head master comes to loathe her. She is still only 17 (p.393).

She hates teaching. The pupils are wildly disobedient and violent, kicking her, throwing stones at her. In a major learning she loses her temper and thrashes a boy to a whimpering wreck. Then does it again to another. Now the children are scared of her, but she has hardened her heart.

Suffragettism and feminism

She and Maggie, in their dinner-hours and their occasional teas at the little restaurant, discussed life and ideas. Maggie was a great suffragette, trusting in the vote. To Ursula the vote was never a reality. She had within her the strange, passionate knowledge of religion and living far transcending the limits of the automatic system that contained the vote. But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form and rise to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman meant something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something, she was not free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For once she were free she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her.

That deeply-felt sense of injustice, that you’re put down and held back merely by virtue of being a woman, explains feminism’s deep and abiding and universal hold over billions of women, but also why it is so incoherent, contradictory and impractical as anything like a set of beliefs or demands. Because it’s a deep gut conviction which can express itself in a myriad different ways.

Maggie Schofield She becomes friends with another young teacher, Maggie Schofield. They eat packed lunches together in the nearby churchyard. Ursula goes to stay at Maggie’s home, in the grounds of a fine house where her brothers are caretakers and gardeners. She is set a-flutter by Maggie’s older brother, Anthony, with his eyes like a goat, and walks and talks with him, but when he proposes she gently says no. She knows she is a wandering spirit.

She buys a bicycle I’ve repeatedly read that bicycles were the great liberating invention of the 1890s. There was a widespread bicycle craze and countless cycling clubs were set up. The device was especially important for women because it allowed women, for the first time in history, to travel widely and freely beyond their homes and without male chaperones. A paragraph indicates that Ursula and Maggie fully participate in this new freedom.

She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an endless wealth of things to talk about. And it was a great joy, finding, discovering.

(Compare the bicycle as agent for freedom in H.G. Wells’s novel, Ann Veronica, and the brief mention and photo of lady bicyclists in my review of Oscar Wilde’s London.)

Outgrowing Cossethay The Brangwen clan have always felt themselves superior to the villagers. In fact it’s one of the earliest themes, sounded in the book’s opening pages. When her parents decide to move away from Cossethay Ursula is delighted. She, too, needs to leave. The locals:

They quoted this and that about her. And she was ashamed because she did feel different from the people she had lived amongst. It hurt her that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet — and yet — one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even it everybody else is nasty about it. So Cossethay hampered her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as she liked. She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to her own height. (p.419)

Will Brangwen gains a position After decades of plugging away at his wood carving, Will Brangwen is invited to apply for the job of Art and Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham. His salary will be £200 a year (p.429). To do this he will have to be located more centrally and so he, Anna and the remaining children leave Yew Cottage and move to a big red-brick villa at a place named Willey Green, on the edge of the sprawling colliery-townlet of Beldover. Will Brangwen, like the novel as a whole, since Ursula arrived, ‘must become modern’ (p.421). Ursula, as the eldest, helps with the move to the new house (we are told the astonishing fact that the Brangwen family now numbers ten! – no wonder Ursula complained about the tyranny of children, toddlers and babies everywhere).

Ursula starts college She completes her two years at St Phillips school and enrols to do an art degree at University College Nottingham (a constituent college of the University of London which didn’t become the University of Nottingham until 1948).

She studies for three years. At first the college seems a magical place of learning, linking back to the medieval origins of education. But by the second year she’s come to realise the lecturers are not priests of higher wisdom but retailers of second hands goods. All the subjects come to bore her. Cynically, she realises they are just being trained to add to their commercial value.

In her third year she is 22. She gets a letter from Skrebensky. It is six years since their last meeting, so, since he went off to the war in October 1899, it must be 1905.

Ursula finds the meaning of life Pages 441 to 442. In science classes, Ursula is given a lecturer, Dr Frankstone, who puts forward the extreme rationalist argument that, from a scientific point of view, there is nothing special about life which, after all, follows the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. But Ursula rebels against this scientific materialism, in these terms:

Suddenly in her mind the world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity. (p.441)

Ursula loses her virginity Anton Skrebensky writes to say he’s in England, does she want to meet? They meet in Nottingham and go for many walks. She is transfigured by his presence and he declares he still loves her. He tells her stories of his years in Africa and weaves a spell, a mystique around the darkness of the African night, ‘massive and fluid with terror’, and this becomes the motif of their meetings, ‘darkness’ and the ‘fecundity’ of the night become the key words of these passages. They appear to fall in love all over again and kiss in kisses described with great sensual beauty by Lawrence.

So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness. It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction. They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream.

See what I mean about the poetry of Lawrence’s primal, elemental view of human existence, transformed and transported into a mystical realm. One walk leads them to a shade of an old oak tree and it is here that they finally go beyond kisses and Ursula appears to lose her virginity.

He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very dark, and again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the lane towards Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end of their kisses, and there was the silence between them…

They walk on to an old oak tree, swaying in the wind, and lie down under it, and this, I think, is Lawrence’s description of Ursula losing her virginity:

Then he turned and kissed her, and she waited for him. The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted. She was caught up, entangled in the powerful vibration of the night. The man, what was he? — a dark, powerful vibration that encompassed her. She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away, into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the dark fields of immortality. (p.451)

1) Note how ungraphic this is, how hedged around and muted and euphemised. I take it the sentence describing the act is ‘The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted’ which is the opposite of explicit. Lawrence characteristically turns it into an elemental moment, fraught with Biblical overtones (the ‘agony’ of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane) which would have infuriated Christian traditionalists. 2) But barely is the sentence over before we are swept away on a great wind of gassy abstractions, off into paradise.

(When E.M. Forster does this, moves from the concrete moment up into one of his pagan or classical references, it is objectionable because it feels so limp and polite. By contrast I find Lawrence’s deployment of a similar trajectory, from the concrete to the abstract, convincing because he is so sincere. He really means it.)

Contemporary Edwardian readers would have been scandalised that Ursula feels absolutely no shame or regret about having pre-marital sex: ‘She was not ashamed — why should she be?’ But it’s worse than that because Lawrence portrays sex as the main way to become fully human, to complete yourself. And in so doing, achieve that annihilation of the external world which all his characters seek.

When she rose, she felt strangely free, strong… She had taken him, they had been together… But it was as if she had received another nature. She belonged to the eternal, changeless place into which they had leapt together… Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world of artificial light. As they went up the steps of the foot-bridge over the railway, and met the train-passengers, she felt herself belonging to another world, she walked past them immune, a whole darkness dividing her from them… This curious separate strength, that existed in darkness and pride of night, never forsook her. She had never been more herself. (p.452)

Instead of being a dirty, shameful act which requires ages of guilt and atonement, Lawrence depicts unmarried sex as a complete liberation of her, a fortification, a making of her character, a giving of strength and inner certainty which will never leave her.

She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was not strong — she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense: — she existed supremely. (p.452)

This is a powerfully non-conformist point of view, in our own times as much as Lawrence’s. Sex has completed her and now they both stand outside all conventional values, free and utterly independent.

They had revoked altogether the ordinary mortal world. Their confidence was like a possession upon them. They were possessed. Perfectly and supremely free they felt, proud beyond all question, and surpassing mortal conditions.

Holiday in London Anton proposes marriage (the decent thing) but Ursula, strong-headed as always, refuses. Instead they go for an extended holiday to London, where they live under false pretences as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky in a hotel in Piccadilly. Living in sin, as the Establishment would call it until the 1970s or ’80s, maybe still in some Christian or religious communities.

To France On a whim Ursula demands they go to France. They catch the train to Paris, which isn’t described at all, then she wants to go to Rouen, and the one-sentence description of the great cathedral for a moment revives the reader’s memory of Will and Anna in Lincoln cathedral. As their short break draws to an end she beings to draw apart from him.

Back in England she goes back to Nottingham and Anton is left bereft in London. He drinks at his club. He pesters her to get engaged. He has six months before his posting to India and wants to take her as a bride. He writes to her father, gets his permission, they are formally engaged, she gives him a ring.

Her final exams These have to be taken in London so she goes to stay in a pension near the British Museum. Anton sleeps with her. They go out west to a restaurant on the river near Richmond which is a disaster because Anton asks when she wants to be married and she says she doesn’t, and he starts crying, gets up and walks away crying, till she runs after him to dry his eyes and calm him down before they get a memorable cab back into London, getting out to walk through Hyde Park.

Failure and decision Ursula fails her third year exam. She does not get her BA. Anton is leaving for India in September. Ursula faces a decision: marry him and go to India to live the life of an army officer’s wife; or remain unmarried and become a spinster teacher. She consults Dorothy, pointing out she doesn’t believe in love, love isn’t the be-all and end-all, why shouldn’t she love many men? Dorothy points out how promiscuity ends badly. So, out of fear, she acquiesces and agrees to marry Anton.

The house party In August Anton invites her to a house party on the Lincolnshire coast being given by his great aunt, golf, tennis etc (p.476). Ursula is intimidated by all these worldly people, described with characteristic Lawrentian hyperbole.

She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she liked formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect. She was not effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing. (p.476)

She and Anton go for walks beside the sea and have sex among the sand dunes. These scenes, right at the end of this huge novel, feel like the most shameless and permissive. We are repeatedly told how Anton sneaks out of the room he’s sharing with another man, sneaks down the big house’s corridors and into Ursula’s room ‘when it’s safe’.

She let him take her, and he seemed mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay afterwards on the cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted, faintly luminous sky, felt that she was as cold now as she had been before. Yet he, breathing heavily, seemed almost savagely satisfied. (p.477)

But the point of these fornications is they slowly drive the pair apart until Ursula is utterly detached from them while Anton revels in his savage triumphs. When the time comes for her to catch a cab to the station they part as strangers. All this is interesting – the way you can have mad sex with someone and yet, on an emotional level, become more and more alienated. It’s a strange, uncanny thing which I think I’ve experienced myself and couldn’t be described by an author who politely omitted the entire sexual side of life.]

Anton marries Left bereft and empty, tortured by nights without the mad passion of Ursula, Anton acts decisively. He writes to the grown-up daughter of the colonel of his regiment, and proposes. Initially surprised, she replies, they correspond, she accepts, they are married in a fortnight, and Anton sails off to India a respectable married man. All this has a peculiar psych-sexual logic. It makes no rational sense but perfect emotional sense.

Ursula realises she’s pregnant Back at the (relatively new) family home in Beldover, Ursula repents her hardness to Anton. She realises she is pregnant with his child which transforms here view. She has an epiphany about the deep truth of motherhood, how it brings stability and identity. For the first time she realises the achievement of her mother, Anna, with her endless babies. She writes to Anton apologising, saying she will become his wife and come out to India, then waits for a reply. And waits…

The walk in the rain and the horses This extraordinary novel ends with an extraordinarily, hallucinatorily powerful scene. One windy rainy day Ursula goes for a walk across fields in the rain and has a terrifying encounter with a pack of horses, depicted as vast elemental, mythical forces. She becomes terrified and has to climb up a tree, through its branches and drop the other side of a hedge to escape them. After lying in a stupor against a tree in the rain, she finally makes it home and takes to her bed where she develops a fever that lasts for weeks.

Freedom In her delirium, she yearns for freedom from everything, society, the world, her lover, her parents, even from her own body.

If she could but extricate herself, if she could but disengage herself from feeling, from her body, from all the vast encumbrances of the world that was in contact with her, from her father, and her mother, and her lover, and all her acquaintance. Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: ‘I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled and entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it, like a nut from its shell which is an unreality.’

The fundamental Lawrence position: denial of the entire world in order to achieve complete freedom.

The rainbow In her recovery she realises she is not pregnant. She gets a brisk cablegram from Anton telling her he’s married. She doesn’t care, he is part of the old life. She sits in the windowseat watching the world go by, the shabby colliers and constrained women and watches the new housing estates being built across the hillsides, ‘a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land’, and is sickened by the world, she dreams of a new life, of a new germination, of new seed waiting to burst into life. And suddenly she sees a rainbow forming in the rainy skies, a symbol of hope for a new life.

And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

God, what a magnificent, hallucinatory, overwhelming work of genius!

Memorable scenes

The description of Frank watching farm hands carrying fresh sides of beef from the slaughterhouse.

Tom taking a bouquet of daffodils to woo Lydia Lensky.

Married Tom Brangwen taking toddler Anna to the market with him, how she outbraves the other farmers.

Tom Brangwen takes toddler Anna out to the cowshed to stop her crying.

Young toddler Ursula running across the fields to meet her daddy, Will, from work.

Her father, Tom, drowning in the great flood.

Married Will, after an argument with Anna, picks up a young woman at the theatre and takes her to a dark park where they kiss and he is dazed with lust but she says no and breaks away.

Anton Skrebensky takes Ursula to a funfair in Derby. Weeks later, on his last day, they go to town then he brings her home in a crazy car ride.

Ursula thrashing the rat-like schoolboy Williams.

The walk through the snowy park when Maggie Schofield’s brother, Anthony, proposes to her. The snow and birds in the snow are beautifully done.

Anton and Ursula in Lincolnshire, she dancing in the waves, he caressing her body through her long Edwardian dress, sex in the sand dunes.

Lawrence and imperialism

Skrebensky is in the British Army, the Royal Engineers or Sappers, to be precise (p.474). When Ursula asks whether he enjoys the army Anton explains the need for an army and references the triumph of the Mahdi in Sudan. The Mahdi’s forces took Khartoum after a year-long siege and killed the British barrack, including General Gordon, on 26 January 1885. The British public clamoured for revenge but it was a long time coming and the extensive Mahdist state wasn’t overthrown by British forces until 1899. Ursula and Anton’s conversation takes place sometime during this long interval, 1885 to 1899.

I’ll quote Ursula and Anton’s dialogue in its entirety because it demonstrates Lawrence’s relentless focus on the personal. There may be wars and fighting and such, but they mean nothing next to his characters’ quest to find themselves and be themselves. Ursula is talking and Anton replies:

‘It seems just as much a game.’
‘If you call war a game.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s about the most serious business there is, fighting.’
A sense of hard separateness came over her.
‘Why is fighting more serious than anything else?’ she asked.
‘You either kill or get killed — and I suppose it is serious enough, killing.’
‘But when you’re dead you don’t matter any more,’ she said.
He was silenced for a moment.
‘But the result matters,’ he said. ‘It matters whether we settle the Mahdi or not.’
‘Not to you — nor me — we don’t care about Khartoum.’
‘You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room.’
‘But I don’t want to live in the desert of Sahara — do you?’ she replied, laughing with antagonism.
‘I don’t — but we’ve got to back up those who do.’
‘Why have we?’
‘Where is the nation if we don’t?’
‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’
‘They might say they weren’t either.’
‘Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn’t be a nation. But I should still be myself,’ she asserted brilliantly.
‘You wouldn’t be yourself if there were no nation.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d just be a prey to everybody and anybody.’
‘How a prey?’
‘They’d come and take everything you’d got.’
‘Well, they couldn’t take much even then. I don’t care what they take. I’d rather have a robber who carried me off than a millionaire who gave me everything you can buy.’
‘That’s because you are a romanticist.’
‘Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never go away, and people just living in the houses. It’s all so stiff and stupid. I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for, really?’
‘I would fight for the nation.’
‘For all that, you aren’t the nation. What would you do for yourself?’
‘I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.’
‘But when it didn’t need your services in particular—when there is no fighting? What would you do then?
He was irritated.
‘I would do what everybody else does.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.’
The answer came in exasperation.
‘It seems to me,’ she answered, ‘as if you weren’t anybody — as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me.’

You can see why they both become irritated with each other. There is no breaking down Ursula’s focus on the personal and her light mockery of Anton’s earnestness, which is mockery of his entire profession and commitment. You can pick different bits to make different points, but for me the key statement is Ursula saying: ‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’ It is a manifesto for complete irresponsibility. Whatever it is, other people will do it while we concentrate on living our best lives, discovering ourselves, expressing ourselves.

I thought that this dialogue happened any time during that 14 year period of Mahdist rule, as indicated above, until page 326 when, the narrative tells us, war is declared against the Boers i.e. 11 October 1899. This triggers a couple of pages repeating Anton’s belief that individual needs and feelings must be subordinated to the needs of the whole, the state, the community.

Who was he, to hold important his personal connection? What did a man matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were small, and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be ensured, not ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason could justify such a breaking. What did personal intimacy matter? One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all.

Which is, of course, the precise opposite of Lawrence’s position. For Lawrence, the community or ‘civilisation’ is an abstract term which is derived from individuals but individuals are concrete entities while civilisation is a word. Later on, we are told Uncle Tom Brangwen’s similarly cavalier attitude.

About all the rest, he was oblivious, and entirely indifferent — even about the war. The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great adherent.

From what I know this was Lawrence’s essentially unpatriotic attitude to the Great War (when this book was published) and contributed to his bad reputation and unpopularity.

(Note: interesting that both classics, ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, contain fragments of imperialism. In ‘Howards End’ Mr Wilcox’s company made its fortune in West Africa – when Margaret visits his London office there’s a big map of West Africa on the wall – and the youngest son, Paul Wilcox, goes out to Nigeria as an imperial officer. Here in ‘The Rainbow’, Skrebensky is in the British Army and serves in the Boer War, remains in Africa for three more years, before being posted to India.)

Why Lawrence’s attitudes to sex, morality and Christianity got him into trouble

1. Lawrence’s sexual worldview

There’s not a lot of graphic sexual description – a quick check shows the word ‘breasts’, for example, only appears seven times in this huge text – but, as you’ve seen, Lawrence’s entire conception of human personality is based on this hyperbolic, super-exaggerated depiction of extremes of emotional and psychological and spiritual delirium and a crucial, central component of this is the vision of couples achieving an extraordinary physical and emotional communion. Sex sets them free.

The fact of their own consummate being made everything else so entirely subordinate that they were free. (p.452)

This is described again and again, with Tom and Lydia, Will and Anna, Ursula and Anton, in rhapsodies of bodies meeting and achieving consummation, which are modelled on and continually hint at sexual intercourse.

Although sex nowhere appears explicitly, a hyper-sexualised frame of mind, page after page of rhapsodic descriptions of psycho-physical unions, underpins the entire book.

This explains why, just a few months after its publication, ‘The Rainbow’ was prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 13 November 1915. As a result, the book was banned and 1,011 copies were seized and burned. It became unavailable in Britain for 11 years, although editions were available in the United States.

2. Lawrence’s characters’ complete indifference to social morality

Arguably, though, just as important in the Establishment’s widespread criticism of the book as its sexualised worldview, is the complete indifference of all his characters to conventional morality, and often their active rejection of it. They are barely aware of it, it never hampers or controls their behaviour. Of Anna, he writes:

She adhered as little as he to the moral world. (p.235)

And she stands for all the main characters: frankly, none of them give a damn what society thinks. Here are Ursula and Anton:

She gave the complete lie to all conventional life, he and she stood together, dark, fluid, infinitely potent, giving the living lie to the dead whole which contained them.

Lawrence goes out of his way to explain how each successive couple lives life on their own terms, heedless of any outside comments or values. When young Tom Brangwen loses his virginity to a prostitute at a pub, and then has sex with a woman he’s picked up in a pub out in the woods, he shows no remorse or Christian guilt. Lawrence just explores the impact on his emotions.

After Ursula loses her virginity, Lawrence goes out of his way to say she was not ashamed or embarrassed, just as she had the lesbian affair without any thought of outside values or strictures. When Will Brangwen tries to have his way with a girl he’s picked up at the theatre, in a dark public park, all this is described frankly and openly with none of the Christian or moralising commentary the Edwardian world demanded.

And after Ursula and Anton become lovers, they go on holiday to London and live in sin, unmarried but masquerading as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky, which was not only scandalous but probably against the law. They don’t care, they revel in their blithe rejection of all society’s values.

If I was an Edwardian moralist, preaching the stern requirements of Empire and Duty and Christian morality, the uniform indifference of all the main characters to social norms and values would upset me just as much as the impassioned sexualised descriptions.

(A side note on this: Uncle Tom Brangwen the colliery manager’s open cynicism about ‘morality’ when Ursula and Winifred go to stay with him i.e. the working classes can’t afford morality and don’t care. They leave that sort of thing to their betters who can afford ‘morality’, p.349.)

3. Lawrence and Christianity

This is too big a subject for me. It would take a book to describe and disentangle because all the main characters have complex responses to Christian teachings which change and develop over time. Lawrence is not unsympathetic to Christianity’s message and cultural significance. He was raised on it and it shows. It’s important that Will Brangwen is made very sympathetic to Christian belief, maintains the church next door to Yew Cottage, repairs the organ, leads the choir and so on. But it is all done in the Lawrentian style i.e. in terms of rhapsodies and ecstasies, depicting a kind of utterly amoral, sensual and rhapsodic type of Christianity which must have horrified contemporary churchmen.

For example, take the extraordinary scene set in Lincoln Cathedral where Will experiences a deeply religious experience and yet it is couched in unmistakably sexualised terms, with the soaring arches coming together in great climaxes of fulfilment. Not only that, but at the climax of that chapter, in an extraordinary narrative manoeuvre, the narrator himself becomes Jesus for the last few pages (281 to 282).

Lawrence has a lot of time for the historical, cultural and spiritual importance of the church and its traditions but it is a profoundly Lawrentified Christianity. He is clearly soaked in the Biblical tradition and from time to time makes Biblical comparisons, mentioning Pisgah or David or Samuel. But these have a different flavour to his citations from Jesus, which are weighed and assessed by characters.

In particular, an entire book could be written about the changing, evolving attitude of Ursula to Christianity. In her, Lawrence describes in some detail the changing beliefs of a sensitive young girl, from girlhood, through adolescence and into young adulthood. At one point there’s a passage of several pages where Ursula considers one by one the main teachings of Jesus and relates them to her own life.

‘Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor.’
Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys?

This seems a fair thing for a novelist to do, to describe how their characters respond to Christian teaching and how that response changes as they grow and mature; something similar must have occurred in thousands of other coming-of-age novels. What most of them probably didn’t have so much is the earlier passages where the adolescent Ursula responds to Christian belief in purely sensual terms.

‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’
It was the temporal answer she gave. She leapt with sensuous yearning to respond to Christ. If she could go to him really, and lay her head on his breast, to have comfort, to be made much of, caressed like a child!

Recap

So I’d have thought it was not just 1) the deeply sexualised worldview which underpins the entire book and is present in so many passages, which offended contemporary readers, but also 2) the characters’ complete indifference to convention values and social morality, and 3) Lawrence’s having an ostensibly serious, earnest feel for Christian teachings but again and again converting these into his hyper-sensualised worldview. I’d have thought it was all three aspects of this deeply unconventional and aggressively non-conformist writer which offended the powers that be, triggered scathing reviews and landing him in court.

Can a male author write women characters?

In quick succession I’ve read ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, both long novels written by men with strong women as the central figures, extended depictions of the deepest thoughts, feelings, sensations of strong characterful women, written by men.

More than once, as I read Forster and Lawrence’s descriptions of the deepest thoughts and feelings of their women characters, I’ve wondered, ‘Is any of this true? Or likely?’ As a heterosexual man living with a wife and daughter my experience is of being continually bewildered by the lack of communication or understanding between man and woman. And yet many women readers, for over a century, have loved the characters of Margaret Schlegel and Ursula Brangwen.

This is too big a question for me to work through or settle, I’m just pointing out the oddity of reading such extended depictions of the most private, intimate thoughts and feelings of women, written by men.

Criticisms

Unrealistic

The obvious criticism is that this is ludicrously unlike how people in the real world think, behave or speak. The defence is, How do you know? How do any of us know how other people are feeling, especially at the deep, emotional level Lawrence is obsessed with depicting?

Boring

Another obvious criticism is that it’s boring – 500 pages of characters all living on a kind of high wire of emotional intensity, described in page after page of rhapsodic prose-poetry, get pretty exhausting. You’d have thought so – all I can say is I found it exhilarating right up to the end.

You can’t ignore the world

A stronger criticism is to do with the tension between the characters and the real world. In a nutshell, Lawrence characters try to ignore and keep the real world at bay. Again and again his couples create a private world, often centred in the intimacy of their bedrooms, extending at most to other rooms in their household, and completely ignore the outside world. This works perfectly for Tom Brangwen whose farm is a sort of microcosm. For a long time it works for Will and Anna who make Yew Cottage and the nearby church into their entire world. But it breaks down in the figure of Ursula who, as I’ve described, brings real physicality, along with history, and then the harsh contemporary world of work into the novel, in the blunt form of the horrible school she teaches at, then Nottingham College.

Lawrence kept reminding me of the Jacobean poet John Donne, whose love poems are devoted to making ‘one little room an everywhere’. His characters are so intensely solipsistic that even when they’re out and about, going about their business, even when Tom Brangwen goes into Ilkeston on market day or Will Brangwen commutes to his office in Nottingham or Ursula takes the train to Nottingham Grammar School, still, somehow, they take their ‘one little room’, their imaginative universe, with them.

The criticism is that this is not a sustainable attitude. The world is the world, demands that we take it seriously, if only to earn a living, at which point we have to interact with all manner of other people, and, generally, lots of them. All of that Lawrence tries to keep at bay.

Seen from this perspective, the novel reflects a kind of primal conflict between the one little room of the characters’ intensive loves and the wider world of jobs and people. Viewed thus it falls into two halves. In the first half, the book succeeds in inhabiting a kind of timeless country idyll, almost untouched by the outside world, in which Marsh Farm is a kind of universe of its own, scene of Tom’s single and then married life, just as Yew Cottage represents the world created by Will and Anna, and all their children.

In the second half the novel emerges, with Ursula, into the light of day, engaging far more fully with the real world in all its complexity, father Will getting his inspectorate, the girls commuting to grammar school, Ursula getting her ill-fated teaching job, the children, the other teachers and so on.

But it isn’t a complete transformation. Ursula still battles hard against the influence of the outside world. She loathes the redbrick town where Uncle Tom has gone to live and is appalled by the empty shadow lives lived by its broken coalminers, just as she is appalled by the lives of the poor children she teaches, and the hard hearts of the other school teachers.

In the first half the characters live in an ahistorical world which is like a timeless dream, which is why I liked it so much. In the second half, the Ursula half, the mix is more half and half, Ursula’s many moods and rhapsodic emotions are more kettled by the real world, which all the time she tries to hold at bay.

I imagine critics have discovered all kinds of dichotomies in the text. The obvious one is between men and women. Then another obvious one, between town and country. But I suggest yet another dichotomy which dominates the text, echoing the town and country one in places, but lying deeper: this is the dichotomy between the ‘little room world’ each of the characters creates and treasures, and their rejection of and resistance against the Outside World. Again and again the characters seek to ridicule, belittle and abolish the outside world. Here’s Ursula walking through Nottingham, with its bright street lights and busy trams and panting trains, rejecting the lot:

‘The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it? — nothing, just nothing.’

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the civic uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or sat were only dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness, the dark stream that contained them all. They were like little paper ships in their motion. (pages 447 to 448)

And here’s Anton, from the same passage, rejecting the city and all its people:

He despised it all — it was all non-existent. Their good professors, their good clergymen, their good political speakers, their good, earnest women — all the time he felt his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So many performing puppets, all wood and rag for the performance! (p.449)

Lawrence characters don’t just criticise the external world, they seek to annihilate the outside world in order to let their inner worlds triumph, become the universe.

They were perfect, therefore nothing else existed. The world was a world of servants whom one civilly ignored. Wherever they went, they were the sensuous aristocrats, warm, bright, glancing with pure pride of the senses.

They alone inhabited the world of reality. All the rest lived on a lower sphere.

She was in some other land, some other world, where the old restraints had dissolved and vanished, where one moved freely, not afraid of one’s fellow men, nor wary, nor on the defensive, but calm, indifferent, at one’s ease. Vaguely, in a sort of silver light, she wandered at large and at ease. The bonds of the world were broken. This world of England had vanished away. (p.472)

But England hasn’t vanished, London hasn’t disappeared, the world of work and trains and trams resumes day after day, without respite.

Lawrence characters continually focus on their inner lives, feelings and emotions, scorning and rejecting almost everything about the outside world, and yet are still subject to its presence and pressure, which sometimes overwhelms them, but at other points they successfully obliterate. This, I think, is the fundamental dynamic driving this book.

The sequel

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which he considered titling ‘The Sisters’ and ‘The Wedding Ring’. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works (both about 500 pages long). In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the legal banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel.

Credit

‘The Rainbow’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1915 by Methuen and Co. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 3, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 3, 2025

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