ABSTRACT
In The White Peacock, Lawrence was in part writing the novel that the Edwardian literary public expected him to write. But, as with all great novelists, it proved impossible for him to make his work conform entirely to the expectations of others. Even in this first callow and unformed work, the essential shape of Lawrence's imaginative vision is clearly visible. But it is diffused and distorted by the young author's conscientious efforts to satisfy the imagined criteria of the educated metropolitan reading public. There are two principal signs of this distortion in The White Peacock. One is the fact that although the novel was based chiefly on Lawrence's experience of Haggs Farm and the Chambers family, he felt impelled to elevate the social status of his characters into a provincial upper middle class of which he had at that time no direct experience. The other is that he indulged in bursts of 'fine writing' calculated to win the approval of those who believed that a young writer should make every effort to master 'a good prose style' conceived as a separable part of his novelistic equipment. However useful this procedure may be for the average aspiring writer, it was quite the wrong course for so idiosyncratic a genius as Lawrence to follow and fortunately he himself realized this even before The White Peacock was quite finished. Writing in October 1910 to Sidney Pawling about the novel that was to become Sons and Lovers (then called Paul Morel), he affirmed that it 'will be a novel - not a florid prose-poem, or a decorated idyll running to seed in realism'. The first of the descriptive phrases 'a florid prose-poem' refers to The Trespasser which Lawrence fashioned out of the work of his Croydon friend Helen Corke.
