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Up close and dangerous: the irresistible allure of DH Lawrence

For decades he was wildly out of fashion, now DH Lawrence is everywhere – from novels and biographies to a new adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

When the clock struck for lockdown last March, many of us found ourselves condemned to live alongside people in more intense proximity than we’d bargained for. Flatmates, spouses, children were no longer occasional companions but a constant presence. For me, this has been the case with DH Lawrence.

Having committed to writing a book on him, suddenly I found myself sequestered with him. There was a time when this would have felt sexually charged. In my 20s, I fell for his vision of bodily life, as so many of his female readers had done. “His intuitive intelligence sought the core of woman,” Anaïs Nin wrote after his death. Visiting the shrine at Lawrence’s former ranch in New Mexico in 1939, WH Auden mocked the “cars of women pilgrims” traipsing “to stand reverently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him”.

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