twenty pounds needed in a lump sum to pay the entrance fee at the training college for teachers made it impossible for him to make use of the gained advantage.
Two years later, however, he succeeded in matriculating at the Nottingham Day Training College, But by that time the creative impulse had already begun ta stir within him, aided by an early love affair, and so he wrote poems and worked at his first novel when he should have been studying. At twenty-three he left the college and went to London to teach school, to study French and German, and to write. At twenty-five he had his first novel—“The White Peacock”—accepted and printed. But the death of his mother only a month before that event made his victory seem useless and joyless. After the publication of his second novel, in 1912, he became able to give up teaching in order to devote himself entirely to his art. Out of that leisure—and perhaps also out of the sorrow caused by the loss of her who until then had been the mainspring of his life—came “Sons and Lovers” and “The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd.”
What has struck me most deeply in these two works—apart from their splendid craftsmanship—is their psychological penetration, so closely paralleling the most recent conclusions of the world’s leading thinkers. In the hands of this writer, barely emerged out of obscurity, sex becomes almost a new thing. Not only the relationship between man and woman, but also that of mother and child is laid bare in a new light which startles—or even shocks—but which nevertheless compels acceptance. One might think that Mr. Lawrence had carefully studied and employed the very latest theories of such men as Freud, for instance, and
