The Early Novels: The White Peacock, The Trespasser, and Sons and Lovers

Abstract

LAWRENCE’S early novels, except for The Trespasser, are about his native area. He writes about what he knows well, and this is evident in the realism with which he describes people and places, especially in Sons and Lovers. But he is not content with this limited aim. His Romantic inheritance makes him also wish to transform the familiar—not to give it a falsely enchanted glamour, but, in Wordsworth’s phrase, to throw over it “a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.”¹ The effect can be summarized in this sentence from The White Peacock: “I looked down on the blackness where trees filled the quarry, and the valley bottoms, and it seemed that the world, my own home-world, was strange again” (Chap. 11).