‘At the Gates’: New Commentaries on a Lost Text by D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

This article presents and discusses a series of newly discovered documents relating to D. H. Lawrence's lost work 'At the Gates', a philosophical essay that was written in 1917, never published, and later destroyed. The work was submitted to and rejected by the publishers Chatto & Windus. The archives of that firm contain four accounts of the manuscript in the form of readers' reports and responses. Taken together, these documents amount to the fullest available description of the work. The article reproduces these documents and discusses the rejection of Lawrence's work within the context of the literary marketplace, and Lawrence's attitudes towards it, in 1917.