I conclude with lots of questions. Although Lawrence has long been known as a sexually explicit writer, forms of sexual experience exist at the margins of his writing which cut against the grain of how authentic sexuality is identified in his work overall, and which constitute Lawrence's guilty pleasures. Here ‘perversity’ is not a simple term. An indulgence in transgression, or experiences properly associated with the opposite sex, figure powerfully in many texts, but not simply as objects of Lawrence's wholesome critique. Sexually speaking, Lawrence can be (and is) in (at least) two different places at once – inviting identification with his masochistic, sacrificial figures of dissolute femininity and with his authentic dark males. He also wants both speech and silence, writing what should not be written, all at the same time.

‘What happened’ to Kate in The Plumed Serpent ‘was dark and untellable’ (PS 439) – ‘dark and untellable’, and yet Lawrence tries to tell us it. Good sex is not just frictionless and vaginal, but crucially purified of language. So how is one to represent this – what happens to ‘untellable’ sex when you try to tell on it? Mellors feels ‘the cruel sense of unfinished aloneness, that needed a silent woman folded in his arms’ (LCL 144, my emphasis). Yet Connie is anything but silent, in that her narrated point of view, articulating to the last exquisite physical detail the twists of her awakening sex, dominates the text. Whilst one voice urges us not to kiss and tell, still another must speak the unspeakable.

In all this perversion, prevarication and power-play, what Lawrentian pleasure actually is becomes more and more obscure. Is it sensory plenitude or momentary annihilation? Mutual exchange or phallic domination? These questions themselves beg a series of more specific questions about the relationship between writing and sex in Lawrence, or what written sex might be. Can there be, for Lawrence, an ‘authentically’ sexual way of bringing sex into language? Do words already have their own sexuality? Can sex exist without words – can it really be seen (even in Lawrence) as extra- or prelinguistic, an act beyond discourse?