ABSTRACT
Leavis was identified from the 1930s with the Cambridge-based literary journal Scrutiny and he lost no time in writing critically, cognizant of Murry and Eliot, about Lawrence’s positive contribution to English literature. He writes as a self-confessed admirer, insistent about Lawrence’s ‘genius’ and contemporary significance. In doing so, he was moving counter to T.S. Eliot’s version of an ‘heretical’ Lawrence (in After Strange Gods), viewed as incapable of effective cultural analysis because of his partiality, insufficiently educated to be a custodian of meaning, and negatively anti-tradition. Aside from a considerable number of essays and commentaries, Leavis’s principal and influential defence of Lawrence came in 1955 with a full-length study, D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. Although he returned to Lawrence in Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D.H. Lawrence (1976), it is the volume of 1955 which is acknowledged to have had the most impact in its positive reassessment of Lawrence’s fiction. For an understanding of the terms in which Leavis attempted to establish his version of a literary tradition in English writing, with specific emphasis on the novel, it is useful to turn to The Great Tradition (1948), and in particular the synoptic first chapter of that book.
