L'Espace Perdu: D. H. Lawrence's Travel Writings

Abstract

From Twilight in Italy (1916) to the unfinished and posthumously published Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932), D. H. Lawrence's travel writing shows a continuous experimentation with the genre. His books include a journalistic report of pre-war Europe and his coming to terms with the tragedy of poverty and emigration in early twentieth-century Italy (Twilight in Italy), the immediate rendering of a personal experience in diary form (Sea and Sardinia), the fragmented description of his encounter with so different a reality as the Mexican one (Mornings in Mexico), and the ‘half-scientific’ intentions which underlie Sketches of Etruscan Places. In spite of their stylistic difference and variety of images and contents, these books reveal a common intention, which is the author's attempt to escape the wasteland of mechanisation and industrialisation, and to find an ideal place for a re-birth, a palingenesis, where humankind could live a harmonious relationship with Nature, with the Other and with the Self.