Revision and Competing Voices in D. H. Lawrence's Collaborations with Women

Abstract

Scholars of literary collaboration have often focused on creative partnerships between writers of the same gender to the exclusion of those between men and women. They have also celebrated texts in which the writers' voices seem to blend harmoniously and indistinguishably together over those that highlight collaborative disagreement. These tendencies have obscured how many modernist writers viewed collaboration between men and women and the spirited conflict it frequently produced as important elements of their larger project to revitalize art. This essay traces the development of D. H. Lawrence's collaborative aesthetic as a case study, focusing on his working relationships with his one-time fiancee Louie Burrows on the short story Goose Fair, his adolescent sweetheart Jessie Chambers on Sons and Lovers, and the Australian novelist Mollie Skinner on The Boy in the Bush . The vibrant interplay of male and female voices that animates many of the drafts, fragments, and published versions of these works reveals Lawrence's desire to preserve his disagreements with women by letting their contributions stand in unresolved dialogue with his own. I also examine some uses and limitations of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence , which too often misrepresents Lawrence's literary-cultural contexts of production by codifying works wrote with others as products of his genius alone, even though repeatedly invited and often depended on women to help shape the texts he would have wished to see printed.