Out of England, Out of Africa: Reorienting Domestic Desire in The First 'Women in Love'

Abstract

This essay reads D. H. Lawrence's The First 'Women in Love' (1916) and its contexts against the author's more familiar 1920 revision, Women in Love, to explore how the earlier novel more aggressively challenged the conventions of British domestic fiction. If the domestic novel helped to articulate the middleclass British subject defined by psychological depth and by moral rather than material value, as proposed by Nancy Armstrong, then Lawrence's 1916 novel sought to disrupt these constructs most profoundly. As a wartime novel defined by instability and struggle rather than postwar resignation and fatalism, the 1916 novel questioned constructions of British selfhood and related forms of idealism promoted in the domestic novel and upheld throughout the war on the domestic front. The First 'Women in Love' thereby also engages more favorably with differences of race, class, and sexual orientation than the 1920 revision.