This was a joke I often used to make in my own ever-evolving lecture about women and writing. I used to say, “I wrote my first three novels while expecting my first three babies,” and would then outline the challenge I had writing my fourth novel without being pregnant. Eventually, I got tired of this attempted witticism and dropped it, but it did no more than record a fact. Men might have thought it an impertinent fact, but it meant a lot to me, as pregnancy and childbirth seemed so intimately connected with my career and writing life.

In her lecture, Le Guin discusses an episode in my third novel, The Millstone, in which the narrator, Rosamund, describes how her baby has chewed up quite a lot of her flatmate’s novel-in-progress. Le Guin makes the point that the tone of this scene is comic and accepting rather than bitter or tragic. Both women survive it without acrimony: babies do eat books, and, as she says, and it is terrible, “but not very terrible”, because a book can be Sellotaped together again. And the babies “are only babies for a couple of years, while writers lived for decades”. I loved that description; she keenly understood the minor hazards of the writing mother’s life, the interweaving of books and babies.

I so well remember the birth of my son Joe in 1965: as I lay in bed with this very new baby I received a proof of The Millstone’s enchanting dust jacket by Quentin Blake. The two events are closely linked in my memory and will ever remain so. No choices, no contradictions there.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

And yet. And yet. During the Sixties and Seventies, my speeches about Women and the Novel often included long lists of female predecessors who had had no children, and who did indeed seem to “sublimate” their creative activity into writing (partly because no other professions were open to them): Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, Dorothy Richardson, Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf (whose 1931 talk on “Professions for Women” gave Le Guin her eponymous fisherwoman’s daughter). My interest here was largely sociological. I was interested in pointing out the changing demographic of women writers, as authors such as Fay Weldon, Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and I began to emerge in the Sixties.

I, like Le Guin, sought for women in history who wrote about domestic experience. I was particularly pleased when I found, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters, advice to a correspondent asking how best to organise her time if she wished to become a professional writer. Gaskell, who raised four children and lost two, replies that it is very useful to soak the washing overnight, as this lessens the time spent in the morning. In that moment she felt very close, as though she lived in the same world as I did, though I assume she had servants to help her.

Another successful writer who appealed was George Sand, immensely prolific, sexually adventurous, and a loving mother: she said that of the three main components of her life, she put her children first, her books second, and her lovers third. That seemed to me an admirable attitude. She didn’t go in for self-restraint, but she had her priorities.

In her lecture, Le Guin quotes extensively from Tillie Olsen’s influential study of marginalised writers, Silences, which I had not read until The Fisherwoman’s Daughter prompted me. I had been afraid it would silence me. I assumed its thesis was that women had been largely silenced by domesticity, a thesis that I obscurely but strongly felt would have negated my life’s endeavour. I feared that if I were to read that I had been silenced, I would be tempted to become silent.

Perhaps it illustrates how precarious my sense of self was, how lacking I was in what some might call ontological security. I suspected, quite wrongly, that Olsen took an adversarial view of literature — men triumphant and oppressive, women passive and oppressed. I had assumed that she shared the aggressive views of some of the early feminist critics of that period, whom I found disturbing — Kate Millett on the patriarchy and the faults of the family in Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone, who memorably and to me offensively compared childbirth to “shitting a pumpkin”. I didn’t want to be part of that ill-tempered debate, and I had thought Olsen might drag me into it.

How wrong I was about this open-minded and inclusive survey not only of women’s silences but of men’s. Olsen writes movingly of the silences and struggles of Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and G. M. Hopkins, marginalised by penury, censorship and the demands of a religious vocation respectively. She also sympathises with Joseph Conrad. But Le Guin takes her to task on this: she concedes that Conrad may have “wrestled with the Lord for my creation…a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world” but all this while, food was being put before him and life was being made easy for him by “a silent, watchful, tireless affection”. His wife, presumably, although she is not named. Is that better or worse, more selfish or more unselfish, than Henry James’s dream of the Great Good Place, where invisible hands would wait upon him in a kind of country house or club — “a vision of soundless, simple service”? James was much coddled and liked to eat three coddled eggs for breakfast. Would I have written more and better if somebody had coddled me?

I suspect not. Domesticity was my subject, it was what I had in common with other women, it was what gave me a sense of the lives of others. Writing at the kitchen table kept Harriet Beecher Stowe in touch with daily realities, although it gave her little free time for work. Le Guin embraces the values of the domestic life, repudiating Nina Auerbach’s view (which she had once accepted) that Jane Austen was able to write because she had “created round her a ‘child-free’ space”. We know, as Le Guin points out, that Austen was very important to her nephews and nieces, with whom she played happily, and whom she comforted when they suffered loss.

Suggested reading

The battle over breastfeeding

By Victoria Smith

Le Guin’s reasons for trying to accept Auerbach when she was younger are interesting: she had been taught that her own experience “was faulty, not right — that it was wrong. So I was probably wrong to keep on writing in what was then a fully child-filled space.” Maybe it was something like this that prevented me from reading Olsen when she first appeared.

Yet Olsen mentions Doris Lessing several times: one of my own inspirations partly because, as she wrote, “Whole areas of me are made by the kind of experience women haven’t had before.” I felt the same. She wrote about sexual freedom, loneliness, independence, standing alone and taking control of one’s own life. She valued the domestic as a subject, motherhood as a subject. She was a good friend of mine, and although we talked about books, we also talked about kitchen matters: she it was who pointed out to me that my kitchen shelving was in the wrong place. How she knew this I do not know, as her own domestic life was chaotic. Generous and sociable, but chaotic. But Lessing and I shared the belief that women’s lives were important. And that was one of the reasons why people wanted to read us. Had we been honorary men, disguising ourselves under male pseudonyms or gender-free initials, what new things would we have had to say?

Lessing, of course, is a problematic example of motherhood, but so are we all. None of us gets it right, just as most of us feel we haven’t got our novels right. But Lessing didn’t shy away from it or consider it of secondary importance. Le Guin, quoting Alice Ostriker, summons up the possibility of “the advantage of motherhood for an artist” and continues with Ostriker’s words: “we can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where childbirth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years…” I feel that this culture is almost with us.

Almost, but not quite: it is easier to cite women who have written openly about sex, sexual orientation, menstruation and abortion than those who have written positively about childbirth. Some, like Sarah Moss, write intensely and brilliantly about the anxieties of parenthood, and Sylvia Plath wrote poems about breast feeding, which I used to quote in my lecture. But I continue to be surprised by the fact that “the Nursing Madonna” was considered a wholly suitable subject for art, while breastfeeding is still hardly ever mentioned in literature. We continue to inhabit a world of paradoxical values, one in which books and babies are not yet entirely compatible.

The battle between Lawrence and the rest of the world started in 1915 with the censorship of The Rainbow. He called it his “big and beautiful book”, a biblico-mythico epic about the sexual awakening of three generations of women on the borders  of Nottingham-Derbyshire. Beginning in 1840, when men were still in wordless communication with nature, it closed in 1905 when railway lines, mineshafts, and a rash of new houses were corrupting the landscape. The novel was sentenced to death before the bench at Bow Street magistrate’s court, where Dr Crippen had recently been charged with murdering his wife; the 1,011 remaining copies were removed from the offices of Methuen, Lawrence’s publisher, and burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange.

The Rainbow, the court concluded, was “a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action” although the prosecutor had difficulty specifying precisely what it was he had found so obscene. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written 12 years later when Lawrence had nothing left to lose (he died in 1930) contained words like fuck and balls and arse, but The Rainbow was about as offensive as Thomas Hardy.

The real problem with the novel was the author himself, a working-class upstart with a German wife whose own morals were debatable. Frieda Lawrence, it was rumoured, had left her middle-class husband and three children in order to run away with this sex-obsessed miner’s son. Added to which Frieda’s cousin, Baron von Richthofen, AKA the Red Baron, was the only German fighter pilot whose name was known to every Englishman.

After The Rainbow fiasco, Lawrence began a new life as an outlaw. “One must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it” he announced, and as soon as the war was over he exiled himself to Europe and then America, firing bombs all the way.

Like Blake, D.H. Lawrence spoke in prophecies, many of which have been proved — not least his anticipation of his own afterlife. This is dramatised for us in a remarkable scene in The Rainbow’s sequel, Women in Love, published 100 years ago this May. Birkin, Lawrence’s alter-ego, is reading quietly in the drawing room when his girlfriend, Hermione Roddice, approaches him from behind with a lapis lazuli paperweight which she brings down with full force on his head. When she sees he is still breathing, she brings it down again but Birkin takes cover beneath his book. It is curious that Hermione Roddice did not become a cult heroine, because women have been bashing Lawrence on the head ever since.

The most lethal blow was delivered by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), which was effectively the first list of “Shitty Men” in Literature.  Millett argued that Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer were guilty of misogyny and while Miller and Mailer rode the storm,  Lawrence did not.  He became, and remains, one of those writers whose name triggers a mental lockdown; in the Seventies and Eighties, for a woman to reveal that she liked D.H. Lawrence was akin to saying that she liked being roughed-up by her boyfriend. Until Burning Man, I kept my own interest in him quiet.

Suggested reading

Philip Roth's carnival of desire

By Boyd Tonkin

Kate Millett’s bludgeoning of Lawrence was based on her reading of a short story called The Woman Who Rode Away. Written in 1924, when Lawrence was living — or rather dying — in New Mexico, the tale is a dreamlike parable about a bored American housewife who rides off into the desert in order to offer the Chilchui people her heart. Her death, an offering to the Gods, will save the tribe. She is taken by them on a long climb to a cave behind a frozen waterfall where she is laid out for her sacrifice. Lying on the rock slab, she watches for the sun to hit a column of ice, at which point the blade of the knife will be struck into her. It is here that the story ends.

Unlike the prosecutor of The Rainbow, Millett was able to say what she found obscene in The Woman Who Rode Away. It was, she argued, “sadistic pornography”, a snuff movie in “MGM technicolour”. She is right that the story is sick but then, as Lawrence said, “we shed our sicknesses in books”. But should it be read as a story? Lawrence also said that if we read his stories “simply as stories we should not get much satisfaction from them”. This is because he thought in symbols. His own symbol was the phoenix and The Woman Who  Rode Away is another allegory of regeneration: modern America sacrifices itself for the cosmic world it has lost. The woman’s death ensures the movements of the planets; the movements of the planets ensure the life of the tribe, and the tribe connects capitalist America to its roots.

The savagery of the tale was its purpose. Lawrence argued in Studies in Classic American Literature, the most dazzling experiment in literary criticism ever written, that the distinguishing feature of American literature was “unconscious duplicity”. In each case a nice-as-pie upper-consciousness disguised a turbulent under-consciousness: “Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness,” Lawrence wrote, “Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper-consciousness. and the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.” In The Woman Who Rode Away his quintessentially American tale, Lawrence makes us hear the destruction underneath. It is Uncle Sam’s ego, and not the woman’s heart, that is being knifed out.

Suggested reading

The many deaths of Virginia Woolf

By Will Lloyd

In another of the insights of Studies of Classic American Literature, Lawrence counselled critics “to save the tale from the artist who created it”. And ye gods, does his own writing need saving.

Lawrence had the same concerns as we do today: democracy, free speech, sexuality, the sickness of the modern world, the decay of civilisation, how to be alone. But the voice in which he expressed himself was more startling and original than that of any of his peers.  Take the opening sentence of his essay on free verse: “It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity.” Lawrence, too, is breaking into song here. A lifelong claustrophobic, forward movement was his great subject: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”, begins his travelogue Sea and Sardinia.

His oeuvre largely confounds genre, but if we have to categorise it we can say that he wrote 10 novels, three of which, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, were recognised as game-changers while two — Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo — are, I suggest, the first examples of autofiction. He also wrote 70 short stories, four of the most innovative travel books of the century, two bonkers studies of the unconscious,  thousands of poems, dozens of essays on subjects ranging from syphilis to the novel of the future, a collection of plays set in miners’ cottages that anticipate the work of the Angry Young Men, a history book for school children and, of course, the incomparable Studies in Classic American Literature.

He was less a modernist than the last of the Romantics: Byronic in his audacity, Wordsworthian in his ego, Coleridgean in his mysticism, and Blakean in his insistence that there is no progress without contraries. Contraries were what Lawrence was built upon: remove them, and you take away the structure of his being. His contradictions were numerous: he was an intellectual who valued “mindlessness”, he was a profoundly religious agnostic, he both revered and feared homosexuality. The greatest contradiction of all, however, was his belief in the wisdom of the very body that was failing him. Lawrence had consumption from his youth, and every winter was a near-death experience.

No novelist before him had considered the body as a part of consciousness, but the Lawrentian body bore little relation to the anatomy described by doctors. Lawrence believed, for example, that the solar plexus was the home of the unconscious and source of all wisdom: “I just don’t feel it here”, he said of Darwin, pointing to his stomach area. He similarly believed that we are composed of magnets which lead us hither and thither, and that tuberculosis comes from an excess of maternal love. In other words, Lawrence believed that his mother had literally crushed his lungs.  Denouncing science in what his friend Aldous Huxley described as “the most fantastically unreasonable terms”, Lawrence would refuse to be vaccinated today. But at the heart of his eccentricities lay the need to hold onto the mystery and wonder that were fast disappearing from the mechanised world.

So what does the most silenced male writer of the modern age have to tell us? He wrote his own epitaph is in his late poem, ‘Phoenix’:

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

Lawrence suffered all of those things, but he will rise again.

Frances Wilson’s ‘Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence’ is available to pre-order.