Chapter 2 - The Discord Aesthetic in D. H. Lawrence’s Collaborations with Women

Summary

Chapter 2 looks at the major cross-sex collaborations of D. H. Lawrence, who, along with W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore, serves as one of three “serial collaborators” at the heart of this study who worked with multiple partners of the opposite sex throughout their careers. It argues that collaboration with women was central to Lawrence’s creative process. His preservation of competing authorial voices in the first published version of his early short story “Goose Fair,” which he wrote with his one-time fiancée Louie Burrows, offers new insight into how he incorporated Jessie Chambers’s editorial suggestions and textual contributions in shaping key parts of his final manuscript for Sons and Lovers. The dynamic of these collaborations, in turn, informs my reading at the end of the chapter of his little-known 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, coauthored with the Australian writer Mollie Skinner. Lawrence’s commitment to utilizing his real-life creative disagreements with women to enhance the narrative dialogism of his works exemplifies how the discord aesthetic served to animate modernist texts.