Abstract
’The Restoration of Women in Love’: my title consciously refers to the process of restoring an old or damaged painting — the layers of varnish to be removed, that had turned brown almost every colour in (for example) Uccello’s Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery in London. Beautiful, but brown: a fine network. ‘Restoration’ means the removal of that varnish; and also of any over-painting, where a later hand touched up what appeared to be faulty: it means the recovery of the colour and the detail of what the painter painted. It also means, perhaps, the shock of the new: the startling blues and pinks of the Uccello, even crudeseeming to the eye accustomed to those fine shades of brown. ‘Restoration’ can even bring a sense of loss, as familiar obscurities and mysterious shadows are turned to clean, well-lighted spaces. A sense of loss, I hope quickly replaced with a sense of exhilaration: this, now, is the painting itself. From being effectively obscured within its obscurities, it is liberated to act directly upon our imaginations.
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Notes
Re-setting of large parts of the second impression (hereafter referred to as ‘E2’) took place, including parts unaffected by textual changes: the reason for this is not clear.
Herbert Davis, ‘Women in Love: a Corrected Typescript’, University of Toronto Quarterly, xxvii (October 1957) pp. 34–53.
Eldon S. Branda, ‘Textual Changes in Women in Love’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vi (1964) pp. 306–21.
Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘The Marble and the Statue: the Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence’, in Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Butt, ed. Ian Gregor and Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1968) pp. 371–418.
Charles L. Ross, The Composition of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979); see too Charles L. Ross, ‘A Problem of Textual Transmission in the Typescripts of Women in Love’, The Library, 5th series, xix (June 1974) pp. 197–205, and ‘The Composition of Women in Love: a History, 1913–1919’, DHL Review, viii (Summer 1975) pp. 198–212.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. Charles L. Ross (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1982). This edition, far from being (as Keith Sagar has stated) a departure from all ‘the extremely corrupt texts’ previously published [D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1985) p. 149], in fact perpetuates in print literally hundreds of errors. It emends its base-text (the American first edition of Seltzer) only selectively. For one thing, it does not emend any of Seltzer’s punctuation errors; for another, extraordinarily in an edition claiming to correct ‘all major substantive errors in Seltzer’ (p. 47), it emends those substantives both randomly and selectively. I checked eight consecutive pages of Seltzer’s text (pp. 274–83), and found exactly 40 occasions where Ross should have emended his text: 28 of them accidentals, 12 of them substantives. Ross altered none of the 28 accidentals, but also altered only 5 of the 12 substantive errors; the emendations required are as follows (A1 = Seltzer):
See too David Farmer, ‘Women in Love: a Textual History and Premise for a Critical Edition’, in Editing British and American Literature, 1880–1920, ed. Eric Domville (New York: Garland Publishers, 1976) pp. 77–92.
Pierre Vitoux, ‘The Chapter “Excurse” in Women in Love: its Genesis and the Critical Problem’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, XVII (1976) pp. 821–36, and ‘Women in Love: from Typescripts into Print’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, xxiii (1981) pp. 577–93.
I should like to acknowledge the assistance of David Farmer and Lindeth Vasey in my preparation of this paper.
Warren Koberts, A Btbltography of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) E441c.
Ibid., E441d.
Ibid., E441e.
Ibid., E441f.
Ibid., A15c.
Ibid., E441g.
Ross, The Composition, pp. 153–4, notes Frieda Lawrence influencing the transmission in TSib, but offers no suggestion of what should be done about her influence, or its effect on DHL’s revisions to TSu. His edition takes no account of the pencil notebooks, TSia or TSib.
Fuller details of the composition history will be found in the Cambridge Edition.
See Letters, ii, pp. 621–2, 628, 636, 638–9. subsequent references to the Cambridge Edition of the Letters will appear in the text, with volume and page number: e.g. (ii. 621–2).
TSia, Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, E441d, p. 15. The first chapter, in TSia, is almost entirely ribbon-copy.
Letter from Constable & Co. to J. B. Pinker, 23 January 1917 (Northwes-tern University).
See Ross. The Composition. p. 120.
Farmer, ‘Women in Love: a Textual History’, pp. 78–9; Ross, The Composition, p. 125.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York, 1920) p. 60, line 34. Subsequent references to Seltzer’s edition will appear in the text; e.g. (60:34).
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London, 1921) p. 60. It might be possible to read DHL’s ‘rs’ as an ‘n’ (the word appears in a holograph revision), but that would still leave the word as ‘venatility’.
Time and Tide. ii (1 July 19211 629
Letter from Secker to Seltzer, 7 December 1920, University of Illinois.
Seltzer also used TSII in proof-correction at least once: at 428:38–9, he used sentences deleted in TSn (p. 614) to replace TSII’s final readings. He retained possession of TSII throughout: he still had it in January 1921 (III. 673–41.
See D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981) D. xxxix.
Letter from Secker to Compton Mackenzie, 14 April 1920, University of Texas.
See Farmer, ‘Women in Love: a Textual History’, pp. 89–90.
Ibid., pp. 84–7.
Ross, in the Penguin edition, attempts to blur the distinction between the two, claiming that the changes to the English edition had all been ‘tampering’, ‘forced labour’, ‘tinkering ... at the behest of Secker’ (pp. 46–7). He accordingly ignores all the proof-corrections DHL voluntarily made, with the single exception of the chapter titles: themselves an example of work deliberately solicited by Secker: ‘I hope you will not mind adding chapter titles ...’ (III. 606 n. 2). Ross also gives, as title for chapter 7, ‘Totem’ instead of ‘Fetish’; ‘Totem’ was introduced into the novel in its second impression, and represents Secker’s response to Philip Heseltine’s threats of a libel suit. Elsewhere, Ross describes the second impression of the novel as ‘an inconsistent bowdlerization’ (p. 46).
Ross, The Composition, pp. 153–4. Ross’s article ‘A Problem of Textual Transmission in the Typescripts of Women in Love’ is a far more serious analysis of the problem, but its findings are ignored by his book. He also ignores, in both article and book, the punctuation changes which Frieda made; his list of problem-cases is incomplete; and his suggested method of editorial procedure (p. 200) is not entirely practical.
Mabel Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932) p. 50; Frieda did however, deny the claim later in life.
Information from Mark Kinkead-Weekes, whose advice, enthusiasm and scholarship, generously shared over many years, I should here like to acknowledge.
Revroduced from Ross, The Composition;pp. 159–60.
Ross, The Composition, p. 154.
E.g., ‘involuntary marks on the canvas which may suggest much deeper ways by which you can trap the fact you are obsessed by’ [David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975) p. 53].
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Worthen, J. (1989). The Restoration of Women in Love . In: Preston, P., Hoare, P. (eds) D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09848-4_2
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