Like ink and milk

John Bayley

  • ‘Sons and Lovers’: The Unexpurgated Text by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron
    Cambridge, 675 pp, £70.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 521 24276 2
  • D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912 by John Worthen
    Cambridge, 464 pp, £14.95, September 1992, ISBN 0 521 43221 9
  • ‘Sons and Lovers’ by Michael Black
    Cambridge, 126 pp, £19.95, September 1992, ISBN 0 521 36074 9

The novel is a natural vehicle for superiorities. In an age which took competition for granted, the novelist possessed a means of distancing himself, morally, socially and sexually, from his contemporaries; and many of them seized the opportunity, D.H. Lawrence no less than Jane Austen. That establishing and disengaging of the self became in the 19th century more and more a part of the classic writer’s instinct, and merges with the novel’s own unique form of self-therapy. Dickens explores himself through it and Lawrence cures his sickness; Hardy assuages his Biblical ‘astonishment and fear’ at the horror of life: Jane Austen overcomes helplessness, malice and contempt.

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