SOURCE: Williams, Linda Ruth. “‘We've Been Forgetting That We're Flesh and Blood, Mother’: ‘Glad Ghosts’ and Uncanny Bodies.” D. H. Lawrence Review 27, no. 2 (1998): 233-53.

In the following essay, Williams perceives “Glad Ghosts” to be an exploration of Lawrence's psychoanalytic theories.

For it is true, as William James and Conan Doyle and the rest allow, that a spirit can persist in the after-death. Persist by its own volition. But usually, the evil persistence of a thwarted will, returning for vengeance on life. Lemures, vampires.

(SCAL 80-81)

Lawrence wrote this in 1918, in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe, but it is only one of his lines on the life of the dead. “There's a long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death, before we disappear” says Birkin in Women in Love. “We live on long after our death, and progressively, aeons of progressive devolution” (WL 204). Later it is...