Ask any reasonably literate members of the general public about Lawrence and they will tell you that his chief interest was in sex. The first thing to say is that this is not a mistake. Sex, or perhaps rather more broadly sex as it interacts with love, was a major concern for Lawrence from the beginning of his writing career. One of his closest male friends during his adolescence and early manhood was George Neville. After Lawrence's death, Neville wrote a memoir which includes a description of walking with Lawrence in the country and discussing a novel which he thinks he remembers was George Moore's Esther Waters. It was then that Lawrence told him that he ‘wanted to write on matters of sex, but he wanted to go deeper, so very much deeper, than anybody had ever gone so far.’ That this ambition should co-exist with the fact that at this stage he had almost certainly no direct, personal experience of the matter was a paradox of which he was only too painfully aware. ‘Why bother with it then?’, Neville asked him. ‘Why bother with it?, Lawrence repeated. ’ Haven't we agreed that it is the most important thing in our existence? Didn't I tell you that it is the only thing worth writing about?’

When Lawrence first began to publish, the reviewers invariably complained about what seemed to many of them an obsession with sexual issues, and he began what would be a life-long battle with censorship. Yet as is suggested by the title of the novel widely regarded as his best (Women in Love), sex was never far in his mind from the concept of love and how the two might relate. This is true, however much his well-known, bold statement that he would ‘always be the priest of love’, which closely followed the completion of Sons and Lovers, would quickly prove to be unjustified. After the First World War, and with his travels to Australia and then both New and old Mexico, his concern with love and sex temporarily took a back seat as he struggled to work out his views on politics.