Introduction: D. H. Lawrence and the Racial Other

Abstract

D.H. Lawrence has for decades been excoriated at worst, and dismissed at best, by many literary critics and the general public alike — branded with the terms colonialist, misogynist, and racist (not to mention pornographer). Bertrand Russell, among others who knew Lawrence personally, seemed to add the imprimatur of insider knowledge when he commented, only ten years after the Second World War, that his erst- while friend ‘had developed the whole philosophy of fascism before the politicians had thought of it’, and that Lawrence’s theories about ‘blood consciousness’ had ‘led straight to Auschwitz’.¹ In the feminist move- ment of the next two decades, such critics as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett were outraged by their own readings of Lawrence’s views on women, and the countervailing views of the ilk of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer only added fuel to that fire.