It is startling to realize that, but for tuberculosis, D. H. Lawrence could have given evidence, in 1960, in the case of Regina v. Penguin Books Limited, in which the defendants were acquitted of publishing “an obscene article,” i.e., Lady Chatterley’s Lover; he would have been only seventy-five. Penguin capitalized on its victory by rushing out a transcript of the proceedings, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, edited by C. H. Rolph, on the heels of the cannily stockpiled novel. Among the eminent names for the defense—the prosecution called no witnesses—that of F. R. Leavis, the author of the pioneering D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955), is notably absent. He had refused to appear, giving his reasons in a review of Rolph’s book, “The Orthodoxy of Enlightenment.” In his first essay on Lawrence, in 1930, Leavis had praised Lady Chatterley’s Lover as “a masterpiece of a rare order,” but his mature valuation was that it was bad art, written by a dying man against the grain of his own genius.

Leavis’s influence, and the trial’s sensationalism, moved Lawrence into the mainstream of university English courses in the 1960s, but after Kate Millett’s ferocious attack on him in Sexual Politics (1970), his popularity declined. Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love(1920) still sell, but few of his other novels—or short stories, which Leavis rightly admired—are current. Nor are the extent and variety of his nonfictional writings widely known. Yet the scholarly industry has been working