When, in 1917, D. H. Lawrence published a book of poems about his
early married life entitled Look! We Have Come Through!, Bertrand
Russell remarked, “I am glad they have come through but why should I
look?” Brenda Maddox tells us why: because an understanding of
Lawrence’s marriage is central to an understanding of his
achievements as a writer. The unsatisfactory nature of his own
parents’ marriage is notorious, while his wife’s first marriage, to
his modern-languages professor at Nottingham University College, was
a humdrum alliance made tolerable only by her frequent adulteries.
An ideal of marriage was, for both of them, something to be created
from scratch, not copied on an existing model. Yet in the last year
of his life, Lawrence could produce, in A Propos of “Lady
Chatterley’s Lover,” one
of the greatest hymns to marriage that was
ever written—certainly a finer work than the novel which was its
occasion, the novel which, unfortunately, many people still assume is
Lawrence’s most characteristic.

A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” is a good place to begin,
considering the theme of Mrs. Maddox’s new biography of Lawrence.
(Her failure to mention it is therefore all the more surprising.)
Contending against Descartes, as he had
done all his life, that “all the emotions belong to the body, and are
only recognised by the mind,” Lawrence distinguishes between “mental
feelings” (the cerebral approach he had satirized in the character
Hermione Roddice, in Women in Love)