Some extraordinary passages in Women in Love are punctuated by sequences of long dashes, which challenge not only the silently reading eye but also a reader trying to read them aloud. To answer the question of how Lawrence’s dashes might be delivered orally, I examine those sequences in light of scholarship on the history of punctuation. Attempted renditions of some examples are included in the endnotes. As well as elucidating some hitherto unappreciated aspects of this novel’s social comedy, I make a case for reading Lawrence as a modern master of dash-work.

The fascination with the rich realm of sounds in Lawrence’s works may be viewed as his attempt to intensify a person’s sensual communication with the world. Lawrence was deaf in one ear—the evidence coming from Frieda, from himself in Fantasia of the Unconscious, as well as from Catherine Carswell. Deaf characters occasionally appear in Lawrence’s fiction. Though David Lodge in the novel Deaf Sentence reminds his readers that blindness is tragic and deafness is comic, Lawrence’s stories of the blind and the deaf do not seem to illustrate this theory since the author turns both blindness and deafness into the markers of contact with a different world.In the short story “The Last Laugh,” the deaf female character Miss James and her friend Mr Marchbanks come in touch with the unknown in the form of a demonic laughing sound at the “gothic” hour—midnight, and near the “gothic” place—an old church shattered by a storm. The man’s transformed appearance, his flesh-creeping laugh and “queer, gleaming, goat-like eyes” represent his being possessed by Pan. This takes him to a prostitute and brings about his sudden death, while simultaneously “punishing” the young policeman with a clubbed foot and rewarding Miss James by restoring her hearing.My argument will concern Pan’s sentence: it looks as if Miss James’ deafness has been the sign of a deeper form of communication with “blood consciousness,” while Marchbanks, who limits their contacts to friendship only, seems to have been deaf to the girl’s inner calling and her love for him. Thus deafness to the natural will of the great Pan may become a punishment, a sentence.

Whilst recognising the connection between sound and rhythm, I will choose to explore rhythm and, in particular, rhythm in art. Drawing on the work of Laura Marcus, I will study the link between rhythm and modernist thought and look at the impact Henri Bergson’s ideas of rhythm had on the general public and on artists, including Lawrence. I will discuss Fauvism, giving some details of the group of artists that formed around the Scottish artist, J.D. Ferguson, in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, and became known as the Rhythmic Fauves. I will then go on to explore the important connection between Fergusson and the magazine Rhythm co-founded by John Middleton Murry and Michael Sadleir and look at connections between Lawrence and artists including Wassily Kandinsky and Duncan Grant in terms of rhythm. I will conclude by quoting Michael Bell’s observation on Marcus’ work, which suggests that Lawrence’s interest in rhythm was not an eccentricity, but shows it to be part of an important strain of contemporary thought.

In this article, I will discuss Lawrence’s passion for music and dance, which led him to combine sound, rhythm and movement as a new form of communication and which he shared also with the Futurists and avant-garde painters like Picasso and Matisse. Music and dance represent a leitmotiv throughout his lifelong career. His interest was rooted in his childhood when his mother played the piano in the long, cold winter evenings (cf. the poem “Piano”). While his father, as described by John Worthen in his biography, was a “graceful dancer” and used to sing cheerfully even following the rhythm of the hammer as he mended his boots (cf. Sons and Lovers and his sister’s memoirs, Ada Lawrence 23). Indeed, Ada reports that he seduced his wife by his graceful dancing. In Italy, Lawrence had many opportunities to see people dancing and singing, such as is the case in Sea and Sardinia where he is attracted by the rhythmic dances of the Mamuthones, scary carnival masques. I will focus on the essay “The Dance” in Twilight in Italy where we can admire two amazing local dancers, “Il Duro” and a wooden-legged man, who virtually hypnotise Frieda and another English lady “by the transport of repeated ecstasy.” (TI 169) The two men are seen as god-like figures who seem to have a strong Dyonisiac power which affects the two English women and brings them almost to a loss of control through the power of a polka played on a mandolin and a guitar.

T.S. Eliot made a withering critique of the notion of the Inner Voice; so withering as to invite reflection on the positive meaning of this conception. Rather than the mere indulgence of subjectivity assumed by Eliot, in Lawrence it rather suggests the difficulty of attending to something outside the self. Among the most significant sounds for human beings are the voices of other human beings but in these, because they are largely encountered in the abstraction of linguistic utterance, otherness is often obscured by the illusion of understanding; or indeed the illusion of misunderstanding. Hence Lawrence’s focus on the voice as such rather than what is said. I look first at some instances of Lawrence characters hearing, or listening to, the voices of other characters and then consider cases of listening to less individual voices, voices that seem to represent the impersonal and the cosmic. This leads to some reflection on the significance of rhythm in human utterance and more generally.

Beginning by exploring ideas of “home,” this article shows how Lawrence’s reaction to Zennor in Cornwall establishes that, at least for a while, this was a place Lawrence regarded as home. In examining what contributes to feelings of “home,” it will make reference to “The Cathedral” chapter in The Rainbow where Will’s soul is depicted as being “homeless” because it is challenged by ideas outside of the church. It will then contrast this with Lawrence’s reaction to such matters. It will explain how a particular aspect of Zennor during the time Lawrence lived there were its connections to Aleister Crowley and occult ideas - things that were outside the church and that questioned Lawrence’s thinking. It will then look at Lawrence’s interest in the occult around this period, which will lead to the suggestion that, for Lawrence, a place that made his soul feel “homeless” was a place that he felt “at home.”

Although seemingly presenting a narrative of queer failure and heteronormative success, The Fox is rife with ambivalence, as is characteristic of Lawrence’s œuvre, and should not be read as evidence of homophobia. Far from presenting a happily ever after in its conversion of an independent queer woman into a tractable wife, the married couple’s future is troubled by the lack of a home: the denouement highlights how a shared space of their own remains intangibly on the horizon, pessimistically unknown and untested.In examining the novella and the 1967 film adaptation, this article argues for a queer reading of both pairings on the farm – a same-sex butch/femme relationship between Banford and March within the farmhouse, and a queer masc-for-masc relationship between Henry and March in its farmyard and outbuildings – facilitated by Lawrence’s refusal to see manhood as an exclusively male attribute.

Home in contemporary culture is acquiring ontological value due to our changing globalized world. In Lawrence’s fiction, the concept of home is an important metaphor of self and identity. In this paper, I apply Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to elucidate the meaning and role of home in identity creation, drawing on a reading of The Rainbow. The static (place) and the dynamic (time) qualities of the home chronotope are catalysts of the action and feeling for most of the Brangwen family members. Home is mostly an enclosed static space, which magnetically draws its inhabitants. Life whirls and bubbles around it, making it dynamic as well – from the nineteenth-century agricultural domestic arrangements to the change and flux of the early twentieth century. Thus the stability of home is constantly disrupted by changes, newcomers, by life itself. Ursula’s identity as one of the Brangwen women whose eyes remain turned to the outside world, but who are their own selves only within the enclosure of their home, is formed by the complementary drives of leave taking and home-coming. The threshold, both the symbolic image and Bakhtinian chronotope, is constantly present in the narration, marking the crucial moments in the characters’ lives. Ursula’s identity undergoes such changes and becomes firmly established as a Brangwen woman.

In April 1921, Albert Curtis Brown, who was to develop a substantial international literary agency, took over as Lawrence’s literary agent in England. His best-known employee was Laurence Pollinger, who by April 1927 had taken over much of the “book side” of Lawrence’s work. However, although royalties from Lawrence’s novels were overall the greater part of his increasing income, particularly after Thomas Seltzer and his wife Adele expanded his sales in the USA, income from periodicals was also important for a writer such as Lawrence who wrote so much short fiction. The payments received were significant relative to the length of what was published, so income was easier to come by. With assistance from Curtis Brown’s Magazine Department manager, Nancy Pearn, who worked with Lawrence from 1924 on developing in his home country of England, his income from periodicals became substantial too.This essay will examine the history of Lawrence’s developing income from periodicals in England (not just from the shorter fiction published in it, but also from his shorter non-fiction, in particular the results of his later interest in journalism, sometimes specifically tailored to readers in his homeland), the extent of Nancy Pearn’s role in that, and her relationship with Lawrence. Not infrequently, Lawrence had difficulties with his publishers and literary agents, but his relationship with her was an unusually good one, one of mutual respect, which as this first detailed study will show is reflected in their correspondence. For example, he recommended her to Catherine Carswell, describing her as a “quite golden” “magazine girl” (5L 459). Almost uniquely for someone in her position, he also inscribed a copy of one of his books to her, the Secker first English edition of Sea and Sardinia (1921).

As Lawrence travelled the world, moving ever further away from England, his home arrangements and their representation in his writing changed, from the typical farm or collier’s home to the Australian bungalow or Mexican villa. Being childless and a wandering writer, his role and place as a man in the household were necessarily unconventional by nineteenth and early-twentieth century standards. Predictably, his stories reflect such unconventional domesticity and, in my study of Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Fox, principally, I shall be examining the tensions between Lawrence’s perpetuation of the late-Victorian conception of home as a place of safety and comfort – especially when the English home is recreated abroad – and his rejection of the domestic ideal. Several of Lawrence’s female protagonists express a desire for a fixed, stable home, while male protagonists such as Aaron Sisson, Rupert Birkin and Richard Somers argue against repressive domesticity. This would seem to indicate that, in spite of the foreign settings and unusual marriages, Lawrence’s fiction endorses the sexual division of labour and gendered roles prescribed by authoritative Victorian texts, such as Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. Lawrence did replicate Victorian models of housekeeping and child-rearing, as well as the division of the home in male and female spheres, with distinct territories and boundaries. This being said, he also at times challenged those rigid, gendered spaces and roles, by imagining domestically inclined husbands and independence-seeking wives.