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Unit 21: D.H. Lawrence — Sons and Lovers

what became Sons and Lovers. In addition, a teaching colleague, Helen Corke, gave him Notes
access to her intimate diaries about an unhappy love affair, which formed the basis of The
Trespasser, his second novel. In November 1911, pneumonia struck once again. After recovering
his health Lawrence decided to abandon teaching in order to become a full time author. He
also broke off an engagement to Louie Burrows, an old friend from his days in Nottingham
and Eastwood.
In March 1912 Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, with whom he was to share the rest of his life.
She was six years older than her new lover, married to Lawrence’s former modern languages
professor from Nottingham University, Ernest Weekley, and with three young children. She
eloped with Lawrence to her parents’ home in Metz, a garrison town then in Germany near
the disputed border with France. Their stay here included Lawrence’s first brush with militarism,
when he was arrested and accused of being a British spy, before being released following an
intervention from Frieda Weekley’s father. After this encounter Lawrence left for a small
hamlet to the south of Munich, where he was joined by Weekley for their “honeymoon”, later
memorialised in the series of love poems titled Look! We Have Come Through (1917).

From Germany they walked southwards across the Alps to Italy, a journey that was recorded
in the first of his travel books, a collection of linked essays titled Twilight in Italy and the
unfinished novel, Mr Noon. During his stay in Italy, Lawrence completed the final version of
Sons and Lovers that, when published in 1913, was acknowledged to represent a vivid portrait
of the realities of working class provincial life. Lawrence though, had become so tired of the
work that he allowed Edward Garnett to cut about a hundred pages from the text.
Lawrence and Frieda returned to England in 1913 for a short visit. At this time, he now
encountered and befriended critic John Middleton Murry and New Zealand-born short story
writer Katherine Mansfield. Lawrence and Weekley soon went back to Italy, staying in a
cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia. Here he started writing the first draft of a work
of fiction that was to be transformed into two of his better-known novels, The Rainbow and
Women in Love. While writing Women in Love in Cornwall during 1916–17, Lawrence developed
a strong and possibly romantic relationship with a Cornish farmer named William Henry
Hocking. Although it is not absolutely clear if their relationship was sexual, Lawrence’s wife,
Frieda Weekley, said she believed it was. Lawrence’s fascination with themes of homosexuality
could also be related to his own sexual orientation. This theme is also overtly manifested in
Women in Love. Indeed, in a letter written during 1913, he writes, “I should like to know why
nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or
not…” He is also quoted as saying, “I believe the nearest I’ve come to perfect love was with
a young coal-miner when I was about 16.”
Eventually, Weekley obtained her divorce. The couples returned to England shortly before the
outbreak of World War I and were married on 13 July 1914. In this time, Lawrence worked
with London intellectuals and writers such as Dora Marsden and the people involved with
The Egoist (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others). The Egoist, an important Modernist literary
magazine, published some of his work. He was also reading and adapting Marinetti’s Futurist
Manifesto. He also met at this time the young Jewish artist Mark Gertler, and they became for
a time good friends; Lawrence would describe Gertler’s 1916 anti-war painting, ‘The Merry-
Go-Round’ as ‘the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great and true.’ Gertler would
inspire the character Loerke (a sculptor) in Women in Love. Weekley’s German parentage and
Lawrence’s open contempt for militarism meant, that they were viewed with suspicion in
wartime England and lived in near destitution. The Rainbow (1915) was suppressed after an
investigation into its alleged obscenity in 1915. Later, they were accused of spying and signalling
to German submarines off the coast of Cornwall where they lived at Zennor. During this
period he finished Women in Love. In it Lawrence explores the destructive features of contemporary
civilization through the evolving relationships of four major characters as they reflect upon
the value of the arts, politics, economics, sexual experience, friendship and marriage. This
book is a bleak, bitter vision of humanity and proved impossible to publish in wartime conditions.

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