This study was conceived some twenty years ago although it was not then published as a whole. In believing it timely to present it now as a continuous argument, I am conscious that it has acquired, without great change in substance, a different polemical edge. Over the last two decades much has been written on Lawrence including a variety of studies intended radically to alter the way he is read or the terms in which his significance is assessed.

Such studies include both positive and negative reassessments. On the negative side, I take it that the two most important currents are a variety of socialist and feminist readings which have sought to deny the normative claims in Lawrence's vision of English social history and of the sexual relation respectively. While endorsing much of the broad cultural revaluation being effected from these standpoints, I have to say that even the best of these readings suffer, in the context of Lawrence studies, from essentially working out their own concerns on Lawrence without being able to relate their strictures to what it is that makes him positively interesting or important. At its worst this involves parading Lawrence's manifest limitations with an air of novelty. Believing such readings to be largely beside the point I have engaged with them only where this is necessary to indicate what I take to be Lawrence's positive significance. Readers who find these questions decisive will thus find a counter-case in the following argument, although that is not its primary motive.

My own positive interest relates to a further development in Lawrence studies over the last two decades.