Any comparative study of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce is constrained at the outset to acknowledge the mutual antipathy and implicit sense of rivalry between the two writers. Even before Lawrence borrowed a copy of the ‘wildly expensive’ Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses from an acquaintance of his American publisher Thomas Seltzer, in autumn 1922, he suspected Joyce of being ‘a trickster’. On returning it to its owner on 14 November, he apologised for his failure to appreciate the novel's experimental qualities:

To Seltzer himself, Lawrence was less guarded. He declared that the book ‘wearied’ him: Joyce was, he said, ‘so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental’. He is reported to have referred to Molly Bloom's soliloquy as ‘the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written’. In ‘The Future of the Novel [Surgery for the Novel – Or a Bomb]’, an essay written between December 1922 and February 1923, Lawrence grouped Joyce with Proust and Dorothy Richardson as representatives of an extreme self-consciousness in modern fiction which effectively spelt the death of the ‘serious novel’: and in the 1923 ‘Foreword’ to Studies in Classic American Literature he celebrated the modernity of ‘Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman’ by comparing them favourably to ‘the more brittle bits of French or Marinetti or Irish production’.