ABSTRACT
This chapter examines various cruxes in the Cambridge Lawrence editions in order to test the claims of one or another editorial approach and explores what it is we learn about Lawrence's work in adjudicating these claims. It also explores what role does censorship of self-censorship play in the making of the erotic style of Lawrence's prose. The insertion of unpersuasive aesthetic judgment in a textual argument for choosing one variant rather than another simply confuses our understanding of Lawrence's achievement. It is not enough to say that literary or aesthetic judgment must play a part in textual criticism, that judgment must be as informed and sophisticated as any strictly textual argument. Lawrence himself had internalized much of the puritan morality, that his powerful erotic imagination instinctively sought metaphoric religious displacements and that paradoxically it intensified his erotic imagination, as repression often does.
