ABSTRACT
By 1919 Lawrence had written, if not published, much of the serious work which was to make his reputation as an important English writer. Between 1919 and 1922 he lived mainly in Italy including Taormina, Sicily, where he re-read the novels and short stories of the nineteenthcentury Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga, whose most prominent English translator Lawrence was to become (see Hyde 1981). He also lived in Capri and Florence, the scene of a brief extra-marital relationship with Rosalind Baynes [Kinkead-Weekes 1996: 601-6]). More importantly, this is a period which shows him trying to gain some control over the publication of his work in America as well as England – indeed his sights are set on America for most of this period as the place where he felt he could consolidate a large audience. J.B. Pinker, Lawrence’s literary agent in the important years since 1914, gave up that role in 1920, and Robert Mountsier, an American journalist whom Lawrence had come to know in Cornwall, agreed to act as his agent in America at this time, something which he did until 1923. This was a productive period for Lawrence with the publication of Women in Love as well as, in England, The Lost Girl, and his play Touch and Go (both 1920). He was also in a position to work on Aaron’s Rod and Mr Noon as well as the major novellas, The Captain’s Doll (1923), The Fox (1920; 1922) and The Ladybird (1923), and short stories. Sea and Sardinia took shape, as did a further volume of poetry, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was published in 1921. In this short book Lawrence attempts to define his notion of unconscious functioning in contrast to Freud’s ideas of ‘the’ unconscious. (Psychoanalysis, a mode of psychological enquiry originated by Freud, theorized the psychosexual development of the individual as a child, and then as an adult, in relation to the family. Lawrence, who counted analysts among his closest friends, disputed Freud’s terms.) Much of his earlier discursive writing deals with ‘instinctive’ functioning, so it is not surprising that Lawrence at last decides to refute, in a book, other ideas on the unconscious. The Psychoanalysis project left Lawrence with enough enthusiasm to consider a sequel, which became Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Neither of these books attracted the broad acclaim he felt they deserved, but an understanding of their themes is useful in reading the fiction of this time [102-4]. This is not the sum of the projects on which he worked in this busy period – which include a history text-book called Movements in European History (1921) – but it
shows him committed, not least, to further imaginative explorations of his developing ‘metaphysic’, his personal philosophy.
