Revising and Rewriting

Though relatively short-lived, Lawrence was a prolific writer. Characteristically, he would be writing and revising multiple works, often across genres, at or around the same time. Taking a break from one to write the other became habitual – and understandable given the extended period that, say, a novel might take to bring to completion. Each work became an element in the fertile soil from which the others sprang. To demonstrate the truth and implications of this it is only necessary to take a cross-section of his contemporaneous writings at any one creative moment. Immediately, his oeuvre appears differently. The surprisingly provisional nature of his usually forcefully expressed ideas comes into focus when we privilege textual process; and accepted practices of interpretation, based on the published forms of his writings taken as individual objects, as separate works, become problematic. An unfamiliar Lawrence emerges. Examples are taken from Twilight in Italy, ‘The Blind Man’ and The Boy in the Bush.