Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [7]
In 1919, as soon as they could get visas, the Lawrences immediately returned to Italy, eventually settling in Taormina, Sicily. Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl was published in 1920 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Edinburgh, which brought with it a sum of one hundred pounds. Lawrence was still productive, but he never regained that brilliance of the early days in Italy and the war years in England. 1921 saw Lawrence shifting his talents to nonfiction. He published Sea and Sardinia, a travel book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, his answer to Freud, and Movements in History, a high school text. At the urging of his friend Earl H. Brewster and his wife, in 1922 Lawrence and Frieda sailed for Ceylon. The Brewsters, both Buddhists, were versed in Eastern philosophy. For years Lawrence had talked about leading a spiritual utopia of enlightened souls, which he called Rananim, so one would think that his landing in the east would have been manna to his soul. Instead, it was poison. Lawrence did not take well to either Ceylon or Buddhism. After a short stay, the Lawrences went for six weeks to Australia, which provided the setting for his novel Kangaroo. Aarons Rod, begun in 1918 and put aside, was published in 1922, along with England, My England, a collection of stories, and Fantasia of the Unconscious, a sequel to Lawrence’s book on psychoanalysis published the previous year.
One unexpected event occurred during the Lawrence’s trip east: A rich American woman looking to establish her own utopia in New Mexico read a serialized version of Sea and Sardinia in The Dial magazine; she decided that the spiritually inclined Lawrence would be the glue to make her community adhere. The woman’s name was Mabel Dodge Sterne (she was later known as Mabel Dodge Luhan). She had noble and sincere ideas, not only about forming a spiritual community, but about protecting Native Americans. After much negotiating, Lawrence sailed to America and settled in New Mexico on Mabel Dodge’s estate. It’s fair to say that this move had a major impact on Lawrence’s remaining work. Certainly, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), which put American literature on the map as a literature to be taken seriously, would not have been written if Lawrence had not made this voyage to America. At a time when America’s “Lost Generation” was still escaping the United States to find inspiration and culture in Europe, Lawrence escaped Europe to find inspiration in America’s people and writers. Kangaroo and Birds, Beasts and Flowers, a new volume of poetry, were also published in that year. However, The Plumed Serpent, published in 1926, in which Lawrence explores the will to power and Native American culture, is the most important work of Lawrence’s American experience, highly flawed aesthetically and politically dangerous though it may be.
The same year The Plumed Serpent was published, Lawrence was back in Florence beginning his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When it was published in 1928, it was banned in both America and England. Lawrence had by then begun painting; at an exhibition in London on July 5, 1929, the police confiscated his paintings of frontal nudity. That same day, Lawrence suffered a massive tubercular hemorrhage. Earlier efforts at finding a cure in Germany and France had been unsuccessful. At the end of 1929, Lawrence moved to the south of France, and he died on March 2, 1930, in Vence. Almost until the end he was writing and taking care of his correspondence.
Many consider Women in Love the most important work by the most important twentieth-century English novelist (Joyce was Irish). The novel, as Joyce Carol Oates points out, is neither exclusively about women in love nor even exclusively about women. Women in Love could as easily be entitled Men in Love, for it deals as much with its two male heroes, Gerald and Birkin, as it does with the three central female characters. Whether or not Women in Love sets out to answer consciously Rimbaud