SOURCE: "Solipsism and Death in D. H. Lawrence's Late Works," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. VII, No. 3, Summer, 1966, pp. 495-508.

In the following essay, Cavitch explores Lawrence's representation of a retreat from the alienation and division of modern society into an "isolation of personal identity" and into death in his late fiction.

Unlike D. H. Lawrence's earlier novels, Lady Chatterley's Lover¹ invites a gossipy sort of attention: the novel itself encourages readers to separate details of the characters' behavior from the fictional context which interprets them, and the result is that for nearly forty years the dissociated facts of the lovers' words and acts have given the novel notoriety that has caused widespread misrepresentation. But even now, five years after the courts in England and America have recognized that the fiction is not obscenely detailed in its sexual episodes, it is improbable that the general approach to Lady...