On 29 January 1906 Jessie Chambers was nineteen. As all interested parties now know, she was Lawrence's most important female companion and friend in his early years and it is significant for this topic to recall how they first got to know one another. In December 1901, when Lawrence was sixteen and working as a clerk in a surgical goods factory in Nottingham, he fell dangerously ill with pneumonia. This was only a few months after his older brother Ernest, who had been pursuing a promising business career in London, had very suddenly died. His mother was devastated by Ernest's death and must have felt that she was now threatened with another catastrophic loss. She put all her energy into caring for Lawrence, strengthening to an unusual degree whatever bond there was already between them. As he himself was aware, Lawrence's intense love for his mother had a powerful influence on his dealings with other women. When critics talk of this they invariably invoke Freud and take the story back to the time when Lawrence was a baby (as he himself does in Sons and Lovers). Yet a boating accident which leaves its victim with a morbid fear of water might just as well take place in adolescence as infancy. Whatever Lawrence's relations with his mother were during the Oedipal phase, the way his illness at sixteen brought the two of them closer together is likely to have been just, if not more, important.

As the crisis passed and her son began to improve, Mrs. Lawrence remembered a friend of hers, married to a man who rented a farm not many miles outside her home town of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. She thought that the walk there, and the atmosphere of the farm itself, would be a help to her son in his convalescence. In a very short time Lawrence not only delighted in going to ‘The Haggs’, as the farm was known, but endeared himself to all those who lived there. He already had a quite miraculous knowledge and appreciation of Nature which visiting the farm must have allowed him to refine and increase.