Why is it important to think about the connections between D. H. Lawrence and psychoanalysis? Although he was acquainted with a number of psychoanalysts, and despite his interest in the instinctual life of men and women, Lawrence was never in analysis and quite early on developed a dislike of those whom he called 'the Freudians'. Psychoanalysis was, in his lifetime, a relatively new science, and in his writings Lawrence demonstrates an awareness of and an interest in a range of contemporary scientific developments. It is no surprise, then, that he became familiar with, and wrote about, popular Freudianism, and was also aware of popular representations of Jung's work: this is evident from Lawrence's published Letters. The fact that Lawrence chose to refer negatively to Freud's theses or, more accurately, to his own versions of Freud's thought, is perhaps where critical interest begins. When his contemporaries began to interpret his novels (particularly Sons and Lovers in 1913) using Freud's hypotheses about the unconscious life of the writer, Lawrence began a period of strident resistance, most often in his letters, to this mode of reading. Such resistance, the stuff of psychoanalysis, is grist to his critics' mill, and many works of criticism since Lawrence's death have examined, and sought to demonstrate, the validity of psychoanalytic readings of his work. Less diagnostically, others have sought to evaluate the broader significance of his relation to the psychoanalytic and some have seen in his work a post-Freudian position.

The puzzle of the early work: The White Peacock

What gave Lawrence's work its distinctive character in the second decade of the twentieth century? Reviewers of the first three novels appeared perplexed. There was confusion about the author's social milieu and gender, and irritation that provincial fiction should be so learned in literary and intellectual allusion. His characters moved unpredictably between 'public-houses and dinner parties' and had deplorable grooming rituals: 'among their habits is a trick of messing and caressing and stroking each other's hair or arms'.This zoological sneer loped after Lawrence throughout his career. Behind it lurked worries about evolutionary descent from the apes and, more worrying still, the possibility of degenerate reversion. But amid fretfulness about his carelessness with social and literary form, and his shocking lack of sexual reticence (a charge that began with The Trespasser in 1912), the central issue was bewilderment about his meaning. Few denied his talent; fewer still had a collected sense of where it led:

For a writer never much regarded as a writer of plays in his own time - only three of his eight full-length plays were published before he died, and his plays were so substantially forgotten afterwards as to leave even competent scholars doubtful about what he had written - Lawrence has achieved a surprising posthumous success as a dramatist. Three of his plays (A Collier's Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd and The Daughter-in-Law) have, since the middle 1960s, entered the English repertory of theatre, radio and television, and another (The Fight for Barbara) has received occasional performances; while all eight of his full-length plays, even The Married Man (which at some point lost its first five pages in manuscript), have been staged.

This is the more remarkable because Lawrence – although an avid theatregoer – had no practical experience of theatre. He never saw a play of his own on the stage, never went back-stage, and until 1924 had only a passing acquaintance with actors.3 What is more, living abroad a good deal, he was only distantly concerned with the small number of performances his plays received while he was alive.

Introduction: the priest of love?

If sex has replaced religion as the opium of the people, how are we to assess the self-appointed priests? In a letter written on Christmas Day, 1912, D. H. Lawrence declared, 'I shall always be a priest of love' (i. 493), a resonant phrase later adopted by Harry T. Moore for the title of his biography of Lawrence. The phrase captures some of the contradictions of authority in Lawrence's work, suggesting that awkward combination of the didactic and the prophetic which has so troubled Lawrence's critical reception. His writing unsettles aesthetic judgement by cutting across the relative autonomy of life and art to explore new experiences of feeling and belief. In The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (1955), for example, Mark Spilka argued: 'that Lawrence was a religious artist, and that all his work was governed by religious ends'. Kate Millett's very different critique echoed this characterisation: 'Lady Chatterley's Lover is a quasi-religious tract recounting the salvation of one modern woman . . . through the offices of the author's personal cult, “the mystery of the phallus”'.

Lawrence’s

Quoting Louis XIV, 'L'Etat c'est moi', Lawrence is also echoing Flaubert's celebrated dictum, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' - a phrase equating the writer's identity with his writing. In this formulation - a comic delusion of grandeur, of megalomania - Lawrence, his writing and England are a trinity become one.

Yet the writer who claimed to be the English nation and the European race was poorly treated by England’s state institutions during the First World War. If Lawrence was England, his wartime experiences show a nation at war with itself. The state restricted the distribution of his writing by banning The Rainbow in 1915. This cut Lawrence off from his audience, and his royalties were so reduced that he lived out the war years in poverty. The state restricted his rights of movement, expelling him from Cornwall under suspicion of espionage, and refusing to allow him to leave England. Most traumatically, the state ‘pawed’, scrutinised and mocked his naked body, a body not fit for military service. Lawrence was examined by military doctors three times. In his letters, and in the chapter of Kangaroo entitled ‘The Nightmare’, Lawrence portrays his treatment by military tribunals as a form of sexual assault.

This volume opens and ends with puzzlement: at the start of chapter 1, Rick Rylance reflects on the puzzlement of Lawrence's earliest reviewers as they struggled to ascertain the literary and social provenance of his work: was 'D. H. Lawrence' a man or a woman, what was his or her social background, and to what literary tradition did these strange fictions belong? Chris Baldick closes the last chapter with puzzlement as to what the readers of the new century will make of a writer whose reputation, both literary and personal, has undergone extraordinary vicissitudes, fluctuating more wildly than that of any other twentieth-century British author. There seems to be hardly anyone else who has generated such extreme reactions in his readers, from people at one end of the spectrum who have tried to 'become' Lawrence to people who have felt contaminated by reading him. That reading and writing about Lawrence can be a bewildering and often problematic enterprise is a fact that all the contributors to this book touch on in different ways. For Rick Rylance, Lawrence's early work disturbs and unsettles its readers because it is itself wrestling with the 'chronically disturbed' relations between mind and body in an age where materialist scientific theories have denied any divine agency in the natural world. For Marianna Torgovnick in chapter 2, Lawrence pushes his critics into starkly polarised positions: either they ritualistically rehearse his views or they reject him out of hand. The problem, she argues, is how to negotiate between these extremes. For Hugh Stevens in chapter 3, attempts to interpret a work like Women in Love in political terms can all too easily 'lead to a banality which is absolutely at odds with the novel's power'. And so the problems posed by Lawrence's work proliferate from chapter to chapter.

The risen phoenix

The risen phoenix became Lawrence's adopted emblem when, in December 1914, he found a picture of the mythical bird in a book that he was reading on Christian symbolism, and sketched a copy of it for his friends. Variations upon this phoenix design have adorned the dust-jackets and title pages of the many reprints of his books, including Heinemann's Phoenix Edition of the 1950s; and Phoenix was the title chosen by E. D. McDonald in 1936 for his edition of Lawrence's uncollected articles. A plaster phoenix still stands above the concrete slab encasing Lawrence's ashes in the shrine erected by his widow at Taos, New Mexico. The emblem commemorates his preoccupation with bodily resurrection, along with his recurrent literary theme of the shedding of old skins and selves for new. Lawrence's true afterlife has of course been in the Word, not in the Flesh, but its fitful cycles of immolation and revival seem still to rehearse the fate of the fabulous bird: in a posthumous career quite unlike that of any writer of his time, the risen Lawrence has undergone periodic ritual incineration, only to re-emerge in strange new plumage, ensuring that the 'Lawrence' we have made of his remains has never been at rest.

By the time George Eliot died on December 22, 1880, she was celebrated as the greatest of contemporary English novelists. But unlike the most famous of literary Victorians, Charles Dickens, whose popularity - if not his literary reputation - survived the sophisticated ironies of literary modernism, George Eliot fell into the disrepute that attended almost all things Victorian in the early twentieth century. The two great writers were, in most respects, polar opposites; Dickens the great popular entertainer, George Eliot the voice of a higher culture, learned, self-reflexive, tormented by her own aesthetic and moral aspirations. It was her deep seriousness and determined pursuit of respectability that, ironically, turned modernist writers - many of them, clearly, her direct literary descendants - away from her. Dickens survived their condescension because his popularity never flagged, his comic and melodramatic energy seeming almost to transcend their wide appeal. But George Eliot - half refusing that kind of spectacular popularity, hoping that it might be achieved without compromising her strenuous moral and aesthetic standards - became for almost half a century something of a monument to an era whose name, Victorian, is almost synonymous with prudishness and humorless solemnity.

“Confound their petty politics!” This is the curse of Tertius Lydgate in the days leading up to the fateful vote for the chaplaincy of the Middlemarch infirmary. He had hoped to remain above such trivial concerns and to concentrate on his medical research and practice. Yet, as in other affairs, Lydgate's character flaws are as much to blame for his unintentional entanglements as are the circumstances into which he is thrown. George Eliot's narrator describes Lydgate's state of mind before the vote by a metaphor that points outward to a greater political scene: “He could not help hearing within him the distinct declaration that Bulstrode was prime minister, and that the Tyke affair was a question of office or no office; and he could not help an equally pronounced dislike to giving up the prospect of office” (ii:18:146). Lydgate's highly rationalized yet spontaneous vote for Tyke and against Farebrother wins him “office,” but he eventually finds reason to regret his desire for this prize, so uncomfortably won by his public display of party loyalty.

Appreciation and depreciation

There is something strange in the account of George Eliot's reputation and influence. For a writer so much appreciated, and, one would hardly doubt, of appreciating fame, it is striking to observe the limit points of appreciation, in both senses of the word. I had not thought to find so much depreciation. Given her own vaunted values of sympathy and connection over time, it is all the more noticeable when she is met short of half-way by readers, writers, and critics over the years.

George Eliot herself knew something about reception - reception from others and from the past - and about accrual and passing along. In the last chapter of Book IV of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver takes up a little old-fashioned book by Thomas à Kempis and finds that it works miracles to this day. It has gained by its reading over the years, for its name precedes it in familiarity. The corners of pages turned down, the pen and ink annotations now browned by time, mark a way back to à Kempis himself, with his fashion of speech different from that of Maggie's day, but still the voice of a brother.

In Romola, George Eliot's heroine decides, not without a great deal of conscience- searching, to leave her home city of Florence, and to leave Tito, the husband who had disappointed and disillusioned her, and whom she no longer loves or respects. Rather than take a conventional path of flight for an unhappy wife - taking refuge with friends, or in a cloister - “she had invented a lot for herself - to go to the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice, and ask her how an instructed woman would support herself in a lonely life there” (36). The life that lies ahead of her may be one of loneliness and endurance, but it will be one of freedom. As she leaves the city in a wintry dawn, the sun bursts forth in an apparent symbol of hope, “a divine presence stirring all those inarticulate sensibilities which are our deepest life” (36). The installment - installment 7, in the form in which Romola originally appeared in the Cornhill Magazine - concluded with her facing away from Florence and pausing for a moment, “free and alone. ”

James Sully, founder of the first English philosophical journal Mind, wrote a study of “George Eliot's Art” for an early number of the journal. This piece stands out, in a periodical devoted to academic and professional philosophy, as the single article in the journal's history (published since 1876) to treat a novelist or poet. But this fact is not surprising, given how seriously Eliot's contemporaries took her status as a philosopher and a moral teacher. Sully observes of George Eliot that people “are apt to think and speak of her as a discoverer and enforcer of moral truth rather than an artist,” while George Cooke, in his 1884 study of her work writes, “she was an ethical prophet.” Such comments were standard among George Eliot's Victorian readers. Henry James, in fact, saw her work as too philosophical and intellectual, complaining that “the philosophical door is always open on her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught of ethical purpose draws across.”

”George Eliot” came into existence on 4 February 1857, as the pseudonym offered by 37-year-old fledgling novelist Marian Evans to her new publisher, William Blackwood, to use as “a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries” (GEL, ii:292). Of all the pen names adopted by Victorian writers, George Eliot's is the one that has proven the most enduring, the one that did not fade away once the gender and identity of the author became known. Even now, after countless biographies have charted the personal life of the brilliant woman who managed to live always at an oblique angle to Victorian middle-class respectability, “George Eliot” retains its singular power to identify both the person and the writer. Exactly because it is an assumed name, it brings into play the odd quality of a life that could develop its great capacities only under the cover of partly fictional social roles. It is also the only stable name attached to the person who was baptised Mary Anne Evans after her birth on 22 November 1819. Each new stage of her life was accompanied by a change in signature, so that one might tell a version of George Eliot's story by following the series of names she asked her friends to call her. Above all, “George Eliot,” laden with all we know about her through her letters, journals, essays, poems, and novels, represents the triumph of a woman's intellectual breadth and ambition through its expression in writing.

Writing in 1876, Henry James captured his ambivalence towards Daniel Deronda in a spirited “conversation” among three fictitious readers of the novel. Is George Eliot “too scientific,” judicious Constantius wonders? One might as well call her too Victorian, ardent fan Theodora bristles: “So long as she remains the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too scientific? She is simply permeated with the highest culture of the age.” Disgruntled Pulcheria begs to differ: “She talks too much about the 'dynamic quality' of people's eyes. When she uses such a phrase as that in the first sentence in her book . . . she shows a want of tact.” Theodora parries: “it shows a very low level of culture . . . to be agitated by a term perfectly familiar to all decently-educated people.” “I don't pretend to be decently educated,” rejoins Pulcheria; “pray tell me what it means” (CH, 427).

For twenty years from 1856 to 1876 George Eliot was actively engaged in writing novels. The last two, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, are generally acclaimed today as her greatest - they are certainly her longest. But is there a clear dividing line between the early and late work?

Rosemarie Bodenheimer has shown how habits of mind formed well before Mary Anne Evans became George Eliot persisted in her writings to the end; and David Carroll has argued persuasively that from start to last the novels were driven by practices of interpretation to which the young Marian Evans was exposed very early. Telling changes in her life predated altogether her career as a novelist: her loss of formal religious belief, the death of her father, her move to London and work for the Westminster Review, the elopement with George Henry Lewes and return to live openly with him in England, even the turn to writing fiction itself. Characteristically she made her most daring decisions without consulting anyone - not because she was secretive by nature but because she was determined to have her way. Secrecy in fact made things worse when it came to explaining to family and friends who had not been consulted. But the fait accompli became means to her ends. After Lewes died and less than a year before her own death, she consulted no one about marrying Johnnie Cross.