Chapter 4, “Lawrence’s Storm of Fecundity,” examines the stubborn ambivalence toward procreation throughout the novels of D. H. Lawrence. On the one hand Lawrence called the novel “the one bright book of life,” and was more eloquent than any other novelist in defending the form on the basis of its vitality. On the other hand the novels – from Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow to The Lost Girl and Lady Chatterley’s Lover – rarely admit procreation into their pages without a protracted struggle. Reproduction poses a number of problems for Lawrence: it is an outcome of sex that prioritizes procreative ends over erotic means; it is complicit in the spread of population and by extension the decimation of the English countryside; it threatens the autonomy of the individual, especially Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow and Women in Love. This chapter offers a large-scale interpretation of Lawrence’s contradictions. It argues that in these opposite forces of life and not-life, perpetuation of vitality and suspension of it, we can discover the essential tension of his work. The novel is the theater of action in which this tension is allowed to reverberate.

Founded in 1912 by Charles Rothschild, of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves took a modern approach to preservation through the science of ecology, enlisting “Botanical Bolsheviks” such as Arthur George Tansley in order to protect entire ecosystems. What started as a promising venture quickly ran into impediments with the outbreak of World War I and the requisitioning of land for military purposes under the Defense of the Realm Act. I consider these early environmental activities in light of shifting aesthetic uses of nature occurring concurrently in literature. I contrast Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies to T. E. Hulme’s refutation of Romantic “limitlessness” and turn towards a classical verse that remains “mixed up with earth.” D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow registers of changes to a rural English marsh community during industrialization through a new rhythmic form that foregrounds bodily experience during rapid environmental transformation. I explore Lawrence’s ideas of “positive inertia” that he develops in his Study of Thomas Hardy as a generative form of rest arising from the individual’s connection to material surroundings.