NEIL ROBERTS, D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference. Pp. xii+195. Basingstoke, London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (ISBN 1 4039 0069 8).

Abstract

‘Travel is victory’: thus the old Arabic proverb, quoted by another great traveller and writer of the early Modernist era, Joseph Conrad. And although no two writers – the exiled Polish aristocrat turned master mariner and English coal-miner's son – could be more different in their visions and in the circumstances of their lives, travel was essential for both, stimulating their artistic imaginations and enabling the creation of their finest works. The period after the First World War was a particularly fertile one in this respect for D. H. Lawrence, who left England in November 1919 never again to live in the country of his birth, Over the next decade he was to live in Italy, Germany, Sicily, France, Australia, Mexico, and New Mexico, and to visit Ceyton and Tahiti. For generations of readers the essays, novels, stories, and poems that emerged from that time have conveyed Lawrence's delighted response to each new landscape and people, and revealed his uncanny ability to transmute what he called ‘the spirit of place’ into literary art.