Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [6]
In Germany, the miner’s son, Bert of Eastwood, having stolen the wife of a respected professor, rubbing shoulders with a German aristocracy that only a few months before could have existed only as a figment of his imagination, and above all, having found love, had certainly arrived. “I am living here with a lady whom I love, and whom I shall marry when I come to England, if possible... ,” Lawrence wrote Louie Burrows, a former girlfriend, trying desperately to mask his pride in his new circumstance. “We have been together as man and wife for six months, nearly, now, and I hope we shall always remain man and wife.” In Germany he received a copy of his second novel, The Trespasser, which Hueffer also helped publish, though he felt it was an even more flawed work of genius than The White Peacock. It speaks well of Hueffer that he was able to judge Lawrence’s genius and assist him, even though he later claimed not to have liked Lawrence. Lawrence and Frieda settled in Gargnano, Italy, where over the next two years, Lawrence completed Sons and Lovers, began the novel he originally called The Sisters, published Love Poems and Others, and wrote perhaps his greatest short story, “The Prussian Officer.”
In 1914 Lawrence and Frieda were back in England. Weekley had stopped stalling over the divorce from Frieda, which was finalized in July, making it possible for Lawrence and Frieda to wed. The marriage took place on July 13, at the South Kensington Registry Office. They did not have long to celebrate: Two weeks later war broke out, and Lawrence and Frieda were prevented from obtaining passports and forced to spend the war years in England. Critics and biographers often portray these years in England as an unmitigated disaster that left Lawrence an all but broken man. This is given credence to some extent by Lawrence himself, who in his writing after the war fumed against the democratic system that he felt had abused and humiliated him and made it all but impossible for him to work. The truth is that, despite significant difficulties, these were the most productive years of Lawrence’s life. The incredible output of quality writing that seemed to have reached its apogee in Italy under the inspiration of Frieda not only continued in England, but reached a new zenith. Lawrence was again hard at work on The Sisters. In February 1915 he reported that he had already revised it seven times. Lawrence would eventually divide the novel in two. The first part became The Rainbow, which traces the lives of the Brangwens, a prosperous family of farmers, through four generations. When it was published in 1915, it was banned for obscenity, and the courts ordered that all the publisher’s copies be destroyed, with little or no protest from the publisher himself. In 1916 the second part of The Sisters novel was completed. Its new title was Women in Love and it would become one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.
One theory about why The Rainbow was banned is that it was done for political reasons and had little or nothing to do with obscenity. This is possible, given the lack of graphic obscenity in the novel. According to this point of view, Lawrence with his candor and irritability angered people who were in a position to do him harm. For instance, in 1915 the Lawrences took a cottage lent them by Viola Meynell, daughter of the poet Alice Meynell, which brought him into contact with Lady Ottoline Morrell, a patron of the arts, Bertrand Russell, and other members of the Cambridge-Bloomsbury group. Lawrence soon wore out his welcome by mercilessly satirizing Lady Morrell (as Hermione in Women in Love) and lecturing her and Russell on their moral shortcomings. No one in this group may have directly been responsible for aiding in the banning of The Rainbow. On the other hand, no one lifted a finger to stop it either.
A clear and more present hostility presented itself in 1916 when Lawrence moved to Cornwall. He invited John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield to join him and Frieda. Lawrence romanticized the locals, to whom he talked freely, airing his antiwar philosophy. Presently, his home was searched by the locals and the authorities, and he and Frieda were treated like spies. It did not help that Frieda