1.
D.H. Lawrence is often thought of as a novelist of sex when really his great subject was marriage. We tend to forget that Lady Chatterley’s lover was also her second-husband-to-be. Yet marriage was Lawrence’s religion as sex was merely his sacrament. “There’s very little else, on earth, but marriage,” said Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow, drunk at his daughter’s wedding. Lawrence was intoxicated for most of his life with a similar apprehension. Marriage unites two people; it also proves that no such thing is possible. And so marriage was for Lawrence not so much the symbol as the very type of his thought and experience: he insisted with an indivisible passion on both the inviolability of human individuality and one’s need for others. And having pledged himself as a young man to this contradiction, he lived with it until he died.
Continue reading
for just $1 an issue!
Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—that includes print and digital issues, full archive access, and the NYR App!
View OffersOr register for a free account to read just this article. Register.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
Continue reading for just $1 an issue and get a FREE notebook! Continue reading
for just $1 an issue.
Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—and we will send you a free pocket notebook! Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—that includes print and digital issues, full archive access, and the NYR App!
View OffersOr register for a free account to read just this article. Register.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
Advertisement
This Issue
February 24, 2005
This Issue
February 24, 2005
-
1
In spite of some valuable observations such as this, Siegel’s introduction is not a reliable guide to The Lost Girl. He refers to this fifth novel of Lawrence’s, written after The Rainbow and Women in Love, as “Lawrence’s third novel,…written between The Rainbow and Women in Love.” Moreover, Siegel’s main contention is that the novel illustrates Lawrence’s “belief in the power of imagination to change a person’s life.” In fact it is Alvina’s father—”Perhaps he had too much imagination,” Lawrence writes—who is the imaginative one. What changes Alvina’s life is marriage of a kind she has never imagined, to a man of a kind she has never imagined. ↩
-
2
The fragment is published in The Lost Girl, edited by John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1981). ↩
-
3
As it happened, the censors relented later in the year and Women in Love appeared a few months before The Lost Girl. ↩
