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’s estate. It’s fair to say that this move had a major impact on Lawrence’s remaining work. Certainly, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), which put American literature on the map as a literature to be taken seriously, would not have been written if Lawrence had not made this voyage to America. At a time when America’s “Lost Generation” was still escaping the United States to find inspiration and culture in Europe, Lawrence escaped Europe to find inspiration in America’s people and writers. Kangaroo and Birds, Beasts and Flowers, a new volume of poetry, were also published in that year. However, The Plumed Serpent, published in 1926, in which Lawrence explores the will to power and Native American culture, is the most important work of Lawrence’s American experience, highly flawed aesthetically and politically dangerous though it may be.

The same year The Plumed Serpent was published, Lawrence was back in Florence beginning his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When it was published in 1928, it was banned in both America and England. Lawrence had by then begun painting; at an exhibition in London on July 5, 1929, the police confiscated his paintings of frontal nudity. That same day, Lawrence suffered a massive tubercular hemorrhage. Earlier efforts at finding a cure in Germany and France had been unsuccessful. At the end of 1929, Lawrence moved to the south of France, and he died on March 2, 1930, in Vence. Almost until the end he was writing and taking care of his correspondence.

Many consider Women in Love the most important work by the most important twentieth-century English novelist (Joyce was Irish). The novel, as Joyce Carol Oates points out, is neither exclusively about women in love nor even exclusively about women. Women in Love could as easily be entitled Men in Love, for it deals as much with its two male heroes, Gerald and Birkin, as it does with the three central female characters. Whether or not Women in Love sets out to answer consciously Rimbaud’s dictum that love must be reinvented, is a matter for debate. What is beyond debate is that Lawrence, using the moods and, to a degree, the methods of the Symbolist poets, does in fact set out to address the question of modern love and to reinvent roles and attitudes, to revolutionize modern man’s emotional life.

Lawrence appears acutely aware that love cannot be reinvented in the rigid formalism of traditional society. The liberation of love requires to some extent the general liberation of mankind. To this end, Lawrence opens Women in Love with the sisters Ursula and Gudrun having a frank discussion about marriage. Cleverly, Lawrence has Gudrun, the colder of the two sisters, whose relationship with Gerald will end in disaster, initiate the conversation about marriage:

“Ursula,” said Gudrun, “don’t you really want to get married?” Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It depends how you mean.”

Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.

“Well,” she said, ironically, “it usually means one thing! But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be—” she darkened slightly—“in a better position than you are in now?”

A shadow came over Ursula’s face.

“I might,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”

Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.

“You don’t think one needs the experience of having been married?” she asked.

“Do you think it need be an experience?” replied Ursula.

“Bound to be, in some way or other,” said Gudrun, coolly. “Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.”

“Not really,” said Ursula. “More likely to be the end of experience” (p.5).

It is not lost on us that Ursula is embroidering, the symbol of the traditional woman. Lawrence uses this symbol to sharply contrast Ursula’s thoughts on marriage with those of most women in her time. Right from the beginning the reader is disabused of the notion that this will be a conventional novel. Lawrence establishes from the start that both sisters