SOURCE: Ross, Charles L. “D. H. Lawrence and World War I on History and the ‘Forms of Reality’: The Case of England, My England.” Franklin Pierce Studies in Literature (1982): 11-21.

In the following essay, Ross examines Lawrence's treatment of World War I in the two versions of his story “England, My England.”

Historians are wary of using fiction as a source of historical knowledge. Thus, A. J. P. Taylor writes: “Most novels are really set twenty or thirty years back, whether avowedly or not. Thus Galsworthy, Joyce, and even, I think, D.H. Lawrence are purely prewar in spirit.”¹ An historian's unease with the anachronistic spirit of fiction has its mirror image in the reluctance of many critics to view literature as an expression of history. Poetic justice aside, such a divorce of historical truth and literary truth misrepresents the intentions of a novelist like D.H. Lawrence...