Retro D.H. Lawrence essay

Discovered an interesting-sounding author!
Found this in the library after searching under "blasphemy."

"There is now available a whole literature about D. H. Lawrence's life, written for the most part by ladies who can boast of having known him more or less well. As Compton Mackenzie aptly remarks, the dead Lawrence has suffered the same fate as the living Orpheus: to be torn to pieces by his female followers. It was, by the way, a male 'friend' of Lawrence, Middleton Murray, who let loose the whole flood of personal reminiscences about the dead poet. In a somewhat nauseous and turgid book Murray tried to reduce the mysterious quality in Lawrence to so simple a supposition as his alleged impotence. The chorus of protesting women's voices makes it clear in any case that the enigmatic element in Lawrence's genius is not to be explained quite so easily. After all we have been told about him--by friends male and female and by Lawrence's widow--about the irresistible charm of his manner, about his terrible unsociableness, about his candour and his disingenuousness--there still remains something mystical about his person. But finally the girl who had been his companion and confidante during the years when he was feeling his way to his own individuality--Miriam he calls her in Sons and Lovers--wrote a little book about her relations with lad Lawrence.Time after time Lawrence returns to this Miriam figure, a girl who detests the sexual element in love, but who wants to love a man spiritually and to possess his soul and his talent. Against these ideas, then, "Miriam" herself finally protested. She was a perfectly normal and healthy young woman and had never thought or felt that there was any opposition between the physical and the spiritual in love. It was Lawrence who was uncertain, who dared not embark on a real love affair with her, because his mother was jealous and he was dominated by her, and because his sisters did all they could to separate their brother and his girl friend. When at last the lad tried to transform their friendship into a love-affair, it was too late. The girl had turned cold, from long waiting and from humiliation."

--"D.H.Lawrence," Men Women and Places, Sigrid Unset

"Undset was a shy, rather introvert young woman with few personal friends. But she had unusually sharp eyes, she saw people, and she saw through them. Her way of breaking out of her loneliness was to take long strolls in and around Kristiania, both east and west, and she came to know it better than most."

~ http://www.mnc.net/norway/SigUnd.htm