Poverty: 1917–19

Abstract

At the start of 1917, Lawrence was feeling exactly as he had done a year earlier: ‘like a fox that is cornered by a pack of hounds and boors who don’t perhaps know he’s there, but are closing in unconsciously’ (Letters, III, p. 86). In 1916, at least, he had been able to go on and write Women in Love; but there was no longer any point in such a venture. His idea of going to America returned. In the summer of 1916 he had been rejected on health grounds for military service, so that the previous objection to his emigration no longer applied; he asked to have his and Frieda’s passports renewed. And, simultaneously, he ‘gathered and shaped’ the poems he had been writing into a book: a final book.