Although Lawrence came later to repudiate his mother’s ideals and to sympathize
with his father, he retained an evangelical true-or-false model of what is good, a
moral intelligence and a St Paul-like temperament. His writing is powered by
tensions between the classes or the sexes or mind and body or, more apocalyptically,
between natural life and a civilization of death. It had a huge impact. His better
books enact these struggles, which are reduced to a simple formula in his last novel,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Sir Clifford Chatterley, paralysed below the waist
by a war wound, is in a wheelchair; his gamekeeper, Mellors, satisfies the needs of
Lady Constance in clearly described sexual scenes, sacred in intention. It is the
woman who admires and needs the man. Lawrence’s mission to make the word
‘fuck’ holy meant that this intensely serious book was banned. Its trial for obscenity
in 1960 crowned a history of misunderstandings between Lawrence and official
England. The ‘permissive’ consequences of the ‘not guilty’ verdict were not what
Lawrence would have wanted; he loathed pornography.Lady Chatterley’s Loveris a
fable lacking the rich density of his major novels,The Rainbow (1915) and Women
in Love (1921), and their prophetic burden.
In some 19th-century French novels, the test of integrity is the willingness of lovers
to act on their (extra-marital) love. Not so in Nottingham in 1912, when Lawrence ran
‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 343Publications of the modernist period
1913 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
1914 James Joyce, Dubliners; W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities; Ezra Pound (ed.), Des Imagistes;
Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance; George Moore, Hail and Farewell; George Bernard
Shaw, Pygmalion
1915 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier; Lawrence, The Rainbow; Richard Aldington, Images;
Rupert Brooke, 1914 and Other Poems; Pound, Lustra, Cathay
1916 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Charlotte Mew, The Farmer’s Bride
1917 T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations; Norman Douglas, South Wind
1918 Gerard Hopkins, Poems(ed. Robert Bridges); D. G. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr; Lytton Strachey,
Eminent Victorians; Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack
1919 Eliot, Poems; W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole; Pound, Homage to Sextus Propertius
1920 Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; Lawrence, Women in Love; Eliot, Poems, 1920, The
Sacred Wood; Wilfred Owen, Poems(ed. Siegfried Sassoon); Shaw, Heartbreak House
1921 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow; Lawrence, Women in Love
1922 Eliot, The Waste Land; A. E. Housman, Last Poems; John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga;
Isaac Rosenberg, Poems(ed. Bottomley); Joyce, Ulysses; Katherine Mansfield, The Garden
Party
1923 Lawrence, Kangaroo; Huxley, Antic Hay
1924 Ford, Some Do Not; E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; Sean O’Casey, Juno and the
Paycock
1925 Ford, No More Parades; Lawrence, St Mawr; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; W. B. Yeats, A
Vision; Hugh MacDiarmid, Sangschaw
1926 MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle; Ford, A Man Could Stand Up; T. E.
Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Yeats, Autobiographies
1927 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man; Elizabeth
Bowen, The Hotel; T. F. Powys, Mr Weston’s Good Wine
1928 Yeats, The Tower; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-
Hunting Man; Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War; Huxley, Point Counter Point; Evelyn
Waugh, Decline and Fall