Nothing in the ‘western literary canon’ is solid and unshifting, starting with the ‘western’ and the ‘literary’ themselves. Even the most apparently settled and established figures (Shakespeare, Dickinson, Dostoevsky or Proust, for example) slide and twist about, depending on a kaleidoscopic mix of factors – from singularly influential readings of the writer's oeuvre, life or historical context to the vaguer but no less imposing influence of cultural and intellectual trends. The flows that constitute ‘influence’ are never smooth or uni-directional.

What has happened to D. H. Lawrence? And how should we read him today?

Over the decades his reputation has veered. Anne Fernihough's phrase is ‘see-sawed’, but that suggests a sort of regulated up and down or backwards and forwards. Lawrence's reputation has veered – from the days of F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (in which Lawrence's name seems written in the stars) to the great put-down initiated by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), and thereafter into the politically correct pastures of a sort of hazy and complacent disregard. The reputation of Lawrence's work can never return to what it was, when the canon of ‘literature in English’ was primarily a gathering of dead white men and there was little or no critical reflection on questions of misogyny or the dominance of ‘phallic consciousness’.