Unpublished DH Lawrence manuscript discovered, revealing a blistering attack on 1920s misogyny
An unpublished manuscript by DH Lawrence attacking a particularly abhorrent form of 1920s sexism has been discovered in an archive in New Zealand.
Dr Andrew Harrison, Lecturer in English Literature at The University of Nottingham, found the manuscript among the papers of John Middleton Murry, which were recently acquired by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.
The 185-word piece is a response to a short article — ‘The Ugliness of Women’ — which appeared in the April 1924 number of the Adelphi, a monthly journal edited by Murry, to whose early volumes Lawrence was a major contributor.
In ‘The Ugliness of Women’, ‘JHR’ (thought to be an electrical engineer named John Hall Rider) describes the horrified recoil he has always felt from beautiful women. He explains his strong response by arguing that “in every woman born there is a seed of terrible, unmentionable evil: evil such as man — a simple creature for all his passions and lusts — could never dream of in the most horrible of nightmares, could never conceive in imagination.” He asserts that the evil to which he refers in his article is “so subtle in expression that only a beautiful face can transmit it.”
‘Meat-lust’
JHR invited readers of the Adelphi to offer a better explanation for his revulsion from beautiful women; Lawrence took up this challenge with great enthusiasm, using startling imagery and strong words to make his point. Lawrence suggests that JHR’s disgust at women is created by his horror at the ‘slightly obscene desires’ they arouse in him, comparing JHR’s response to beautiful women to that of a coyote howling when it smells fresh meat.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2013/april/unpublished-dh-lawrence-manuscript-discovered,-revealing-a-blistering-attack-on-1920s-misogyny.aspx
