DAVID ELLIS (ed.), D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love: A Casebook.

Abstract

IN his admirably clear introduction David Ellis charts the zenith, slump, and possible partial recovery of Lawrence’s reputation in English studies. (Among readers who are also writers his reputation didn’t slump.) The essays collected here may be proof of a reviving interest in Lawrence among academics. The question is: will they help their readers read him better? Literary criticism exists to serve the text, to help people read it better, more wholly, with more understanding, involvement and pleasure—really, to help us to be affected by it in how we live. So two or three essays in this Casebook are, like the introduction, helpful in that they give us facts that we might like to bear in mind when we read Women in Love. Ginette Katz-Roy’s survey of Lawrence’s dealings with Modernism, for example. Or J. B. Bullen’s showing, with a photograph, that Lawrence almost certainly had Joseph Moest’s Godiva in mind as the model for Loerke’s statue in ‘Snow’. Best of all is John Worthen’s piece on the ‘first’ Women in Love, the novel Lawrence tried to publish in 1917. Had he succeeded, we should have read it as being more immediately of the War and about the War. Appearing, much changed, in 1921, its context feels more like The Waste Land, in the desolation of the aftermath.