While working on the book that was to become Sons and Lovers, Lawrence looked back on his first two novels with this dismissive comment: ‘Paul Morel will be a novel, not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll running to seed in realism, it will be a restrained, rather impersonal novel.’ In so summing up his previous novels, he anticipated the difficulty faced by later critics. For as descriptions of The White Peacock and The Trespasser these phrases seem acute and yet unfair. If Lawrence had never written more novels than these two he would have been already a distinctive voice among English novelists. And several critics have quite rightly sought to read these works as successful achievements in their own right. At the same time, the enormous development represented by his first five novels, and his constant returning to the same themes with new understanding and narrative ambition, means that these earliest novels are inevitably, and just as properly, read in the testing light of the later ones.

For present purposes the retrospective viewpoint is the more pertinent one and I do not wish, in any case, to rehearse familiar readings. I will therefore pass over the first novels relatively briefly just to indicate some of the themes which bear on the later argument. If this seems to slight their independent interest, it should be remembered that even these novels were part of the process by which they were transcended. Lawrence's notion of shedding sicknesses in art was an exploratory rather than a merely symptomatic conception.