The White Peacock

Lawrence’s first novel The White Peacock was begun in 1906, rewritten three times, and published in 1911. The Cambridge edition uses the final manuscript as base-text, and faithfully recovers Lawrence’s words and punctuation from the layers of publishers’ house-styling and their errors; original passages, changed for censorship reasons, are reinstated. Andrew Robertson’s introduction sets out the history of Lawrence’s writing and revision, and the generally favourable reception by friends and reviewers. Lawrence incorporated much of his own experience and reading on to the novel which is set just north-east of Eastwood, and modelled characters on his friends and family. The notes identify real-life places and people, explain dialect forms, literary allusions, and historical references, and include sensitive passages deleted before publication. The textual apparatus records all the variant readings and the appendix prints the two surviving fragments from the earliest manuscripts of the novel, then entitled ‘Laetitia’.