Life and Fiction in D. H. Lawrence's Mr Noon and the Novel's Place within the Lawrence Canon

Abstract

SummaryD. H. Lawrence's posthumous novel Mr Noon, published in 1984, was written in 1921 but never finished.Part Two of Mr Noon is to a large extent autobiographical, describing Lawrence's first year with Frieda, 1912, in a slightly fictionalized form. A comparison between Mr Noon, Frieda Lawrence's Not I But the Wind, Lawrence's poems Look We Have Come Through and his letters brings out the close connection between life and fiction as well as some significant divergencies which tend to idyllize reality.The relation between Mr Noon and Lawrence's main novels and some of his poems is discussed and analysed. Mr Noon shares themes and ideas with primarily The Rainbow and Women in Love, but its tone is fundamentally different. In Mr Noon Lawrence employs an irreverent, ironic narrator who, from a vantage‐point, looks back at the lost paradise of his youth and simultaneously relives and recreates spontaneously experienced moments of happiness.The reason why Lawrence did not finish Mr Noon, which was originally planned as a trilogy, appears to be his increasing disillusion and misanthropy in the course of the year 1921. Instead of Mr Noon Lawrence finished Aaron's Rod, which fitted his bitter mood at the time.