Women in Love

Abstract

Murry made that diary note in February 1915, and The Rainbow had begun to incorporate something of that ’revolution of the conditions of life’ as Lawrence finished it during February and revised it from March till August. Its final social optimism is what Lawrence himself wished to communicate to the people of England in the summer of 1915. But by mid-October he had lost that optimism about the future of society; his magazine The Signature had failed to capture an audience, public meetings in a room above Fisher Street brought no success, and he found the unchanging pointlessness of the war a final demonstration of the end of man’s purposive belief in society (and in himself). Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary: ‘the war he sees as the pure suicide of humanity—a war without any constructive ideal in it, just pure senseless destruction’.² He decided to emigrate to America, but on the November day when the Lawrences’ passports arrived, he also heard that Methuen had surrendered to the police all unsold and unbound copies of The Rainbow, had recalled all unsold copies from the bookshops, and would be facing charges of publishing an obscene book. The news must have come with depressing aptness; just as he was deciding not to work for England any more, his novel was charged with being unfit to be read by English people.

What did Lawrence want his novels to be, after The Rainbow?

Lawrence, after expounding The Rainbow, said that he felt that he would write one more novel, and no more. He was sad, because he was a forerunner, like John the Baptist before the Christ, whose place it was to give up and surrender…. ‘So I suppose my achievement begins and ends with preaching the revolution of the conditions of life—why not?’¹