ABSTRACT
It is axiomatic that D. H. Lawrence spent most of his life searching – searching for new places to live and for new ways of being, “a new conception of what it means, to live” (LEA, 23:28–9), as he puts it in “[Return to Bestwood],” written in late 1926. After World War I, from 1919, he lived in a kind of self-imposed, restless exile, including in Italy, Ceylon, America, Mexico, France and, between May and August 1922, Australia. The brief visit to his hometown near Nottingham recorded in “[Return to Bestwood]” was clearly painful. In “Getting On,” written at the end of 1926 or early 1927, he writes: “I find I can be at home anywhere, except at home. I feel perfectly calm in London or Paris or Rome or Munich or Sydney or San Francisco. The one place where I feel absolutely not at home, is my home place” (LEA, 27:4–7). Lawrence, however, was rarely “perfectly calm” anywhere – his was a life of quest, and of contest, with people, with places, with ideas.
