The Idea of the Novel

Abstract

This chapter relates Lawrence's ideas about novel writing to his own novels. Early in his career he wrestled with and rejected the Flaubertian ideal of careful 'construction' and 'form', precisely chosen words, and authorial impersonality. The ideas expressed in the six essays he wrote about the novel, five of them in 1925, inform his own fiction. The distinctive qualities of his best fiction include incomplete, open form - forcefulness, struggle and even danger - energy and quickness. While the chapter focuses mainly on Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, it discusses all the novels except The Lost Girl. The chapter also considers the relationship of Lawrence's criticism of other writers, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Whitman, to his own novel writing.