Lawrence’s Conception of the Novel

Abstract

Mary is Mary Cannan, and her novel, as Lawrence describes it, with its basis in self-regard, its idealised characters, and its blend of hygiene and voyeurism, is exactly the kind of poisonous creature on which he would wish to set his foot. Emotional dishonesty and sexual wish fulfilment are two human failings against which his own fiction is particularly directed, especially in the period after his elopement with Frieda. What is particularly effective in this letter is the way that Mary is developed through a mixture of revealing action (the bobbing of the hair, the parodic summary of her novel) and violent authorial interpretation, which is increasingly Lawrence’s method of characterisation after Sons and Lovers. Mary, in her crippling vanity and in Lawrence’s attitude towards her as typifying ‘sexual conceit’, is as striking a creation as Hermione Roddice, or Mrs Witt in St Mawr.

Mary has gone with some cinematograph-filming people from the Bristol to climb Etna and peer down the crater. If she’ll hop after Empedocles I’ll write her an elegy. ... She’s cut her hair. One day it thundered and lightened and was very Etnaish, and it got on her nerves all alone in the Studio, so she went and bobbed herself. Frieda says it suits her, but ever since, I can’t bear the sights of her. It brings out all the pseudo-mannish street-arab aggressive selfish insolence, which affects me nowadays, as a male, like somebody throwing black pepper in my eyes. I plainly hate her. She began a novel on the strength of it: opened in studio, where lovely strange lady cuts her long black locks and is spied upon through one of the port-holes by a thrilled and enthralled young gentleman: ‘nice young thing, quite young and full of enthusiasm, full of enthusiasm, and clean, hardly seen a woman before: that kind of thing’ (Quot.) — You see which way the minds of these elderly hankering bitches turns. — But I set my foot on that nasty worm of a novel, and killed it. — Conceit, hideous, elderly, megalomaniac sexual conceit, that’s what ails these elderly scavenging bitches. If Etna had any sense of fitness he’d spit a fat mouthful of lava at her.

(Letters, III, 551-2)