ABSTRACT
The last five years of Lawrence’s life were spent in Europe, at first mainly in Spotorno, Northern Italy, and then near Florence. While the Lawrences had ‘bases’, they continued to move around, sometimes because Lawrence’s ill-health required a change. The American experience was over for him and the relationship with Mabel Dodge Sterne, who had made it possible, more or less at an end. The period in Italy after the move from America produced The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) which is thematically a precursor of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his last novel set in the English Midlands about an adulterous affair which challenges divisions of social class and expectation. Settled just outside Florence, and having made his final trip to England, Lawrence concentrated on the Chatterley novel, writing three versions [75-9]. Although it was not Lawrence’s only project at this time, it occupied his attention significantly, and shows the influence of his last visit ‘home’ (described in ‘Return to Bestwood’ [1968] and two autobiographical sketches), as well as the direction of his developing thought on ‘phallic consciousness’. Much of the ‘vitalist’ philosophy in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is rehearsed in Sketches of Etruscan Places, a travel book which describes Lawrence’s response to the remains of the ‘sensual’ Etruscan civilization (ancient sites between Florence and Rome) which he visited on a tour of tombs with his friend Earl Brewster (of his Ceylon trip) [113]. About this time Lawrence also renewed his friendship with the Huxleys, seeing much of them in his last months.
