novel that reflects the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on Lawrence, is published. The Lawrences travel to Ceylon and Australia, where Aaron’s Rod is set. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are published .

1923 They visit Mexico as well as New York and Los Angeles. Studies in Classic American Literature—in which Lawrence considers Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—is published.

1924- 1925 Mabel Dodge Luhan, a New York socialite, gives the Lawrences her Kiowa Ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in return for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s father, Arthur, dies. While visiting Mexico City, Lawrence falls ill with tuberculosis and is forced to return to England.

1925- 1926 The Lawrences settle near Florence. Frieda begins an affair with Angelino Ravagli, a former Italian infantry officer whom she will marry in 1950. Lawrence visits his hometown of Eastwood for the last time. The Plumed Serpent, a political novel about Mexico and a revival of its ancient Aztec religion, is published.

1928 Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published; it is banned in the United Kingdom and the United States, creating a great demand for the book.

1929 Lawrence’s Expressionist paintings, for which he gains posthumous renown, are declared obscene and confiscated from an exhibition at London’s Warren Gallery.

1930 Lawrence succumbs to tuberculosis on March 2 in Vence, France. Frieda moves to Kiowa Ranch, New Mexico, where she builds a small memorial chapel that houses Lawrence’s ashes.

1960 An unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published after Penguin Books is acquitted of obscenity charges brought under the Obscene Publications Act. The trial lasts six days; the thirty-five expert witnesses called to testify include E. M. Forster.

INTRODUCTION

You live by what you thrill to, and there’s the end of it.

—D. H. Lawrence to Aldous Huxley (1928)

Get your bodies back, men and women.

—D. H. Lawrence, “Men Must Work and Women as Well” (1929)

To some in the reading public, D. H. Lawrence was notorious as a vulgar pornographer; to others, he was an apostle of sexual liberation. It is interesting and ironic to note, therefore, that the early working title of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was “Tenderness.” Lawrence was indignant and disgusted by the public misunderstanding of his intentions, for he loathed casual sex or promiscuity, but he was also not an advocate of what he called “modern” romantic love. “Love is chiefly bunk,” he wrote in 1925 to his friend “Brett,” the Honorable Dorothy Brett, “an over-exaggeration of the spiritual and individualistic and analytic side.... If ever you can marry a man feeling kindly towards him, and knowing he feels kindly to you, do it, and throw love after.” Certainly the tentative title suggests that Lawrence meant this, his last novel, to be a story of real tenderness, but he intended to write about a different sort of love affair than can be found in the history of the British novel. Unlike the European novel, which is rich in tales of adultery (as in The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina), romantic love in the nineteenth-century British novel tends either to lead to marriage or is destroyed because of illegitimate sexual activity. But in Lawrence’s last novel something new is going on, a new look at the cultural values by which we live: Lawrence’s characters are healed by their forbidden sexual love, rather than destroyed by it.

The famous love affair between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper was provocative also because it crossed class lines; it skipped over the middle class and united aristocracy and working class in an intimacy meant to threaten traditional sanctified hierarchies. This sexual union became so famous that the lady and the gamekeeper have become a kind of joke or cliché in modern literary culture. But in fact Lawrence drew on a tradition in the English novel of love and sex across class lines: Fielding, Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy, to name a few, wrote about lower-class men and women hoping to marry “above” them and sometimes succeeding, or otherwise explored the trouble that class differences cause in love. More often the male lover has the class status, as in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; frequently this common plot involves the pathos of seduction and the vulnerability of the heroine to male abandonment. The heroines Little Em‘ly of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Hetty in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, or Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles represent innocent victims of male sexual exploitation, whereas another innovation of Lawrence’s is that the