NO LITERARY reputation has declined as much as that of D. H. Lawrence over the past 40 years. Lara Feigel is Professor of Modern Literature at King’s College, London, and this book, subtitled Living with D. H. Lawrence, is an account of her lockdown year spent with the writer, her two children, and her partner in the Oxfordshire countryside.

The book does one very important thing: it organises Lawrence’s thought, chapter by chapter, which is a challenge, as Lawrence’s thought was constantly changing and developing, and he bridled against the idea of “thought” in the first place. For Lawrence, the blood was always right, and this is the subject of the first chapter, “Unconscious”. The exaltation of “Will”, the title of the second chapter, is the justification for Hermione’s bringing a paperweight down on Birkin’s head and almost killing him.

While there are references to Freud and to Nietzsche, Lawrence’s position is the refutation of all positions. In this, he is peculiarly modern, but Feigel has to defend him against feminist critics who do not warm to his views of women, and she is also troubled by some of his proto-fascist ideas, such as his rejection of democracy. She spends some considerable time defending her hero’s indefensible indifference to the way in which Frieda Lawrence lost her children, thanks to her elopement.

AlamyDavid Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)

Reading Feigel, who clearly loves her subject, one begins to see why Lawrence is no longer the high priest and prophet that people once thought him. He is certainly memorable, in parts, and he creates a world out of the Nottinghamshire of his childhood, but his final book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is, despite Feigel’s best attempts to rescue it, hardly the great book of the 20th century. It is not depraved, just unbelievable. There is more to social relationships than the urges of the blood, and one cannot foresee Connie and Mellors having a happy afterlife.

Lawrence died of TB, and he has something to say about death, though this does not get a chapter of its own. One gem does stand out, however, and that is Katherine Mansfield’s description of living in an experimental community with the Lawrences in Cornwall. “I will cut your bloody throat, you bitch,” Lawrence screamed at his wife. “It is not a really nice place,” Mansfield wrote to a friend. Poor Lawrence: he experienced what he wrote; his was a tumultuous life.

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Roman Catholic priest and a doctor of moral theology.

Look! We Have Come Through! Living with D. H. Lawrence
Lara Feigel
Bloomsbury £20
(978-1-4088-7753-1)
Church House Bookshop £18