The Impact of Censorship on Lawrence’s Conception of “Home”

Abstract

In 1919, D.H. Lawrence left England and did not settle there again for the rest of his life. The prosecution of The Rainbow in 1915 was a crippling blow for Lawrence’s budding career as an author and it left him intensely disillusioned with his home country and the literary establishment which had condemned his writing. He would have left the country immediately were it not for the interference of the British authorities. Nevertheless, Lawrence remained inextricably tied to the country of his birth; like the characters in his fiction he was never able to completely sever himself from it. In his earliest work, Lawrence had already started to undermine and subvert the bourgeois values of his upbringing; as his career developed, and particularly after the prosecution of The Rainbow, he recognised that these values underpinned the censorship of his work, and he would spend the rest of his career writing back against the climate of censorship in Britain and America.

Keywords

• home
• censorship
• obscenity
• bourgeois
• prosecution