Architecture

This chapter will survey Lawrence’s responses to architecture – European and otherwise, domestic and religious, ancient and modern - in and outside of his fiction (for example Gothic architecture in The Rainbow, the country house in Women in Love, the tombs of the Etruscans) before addressing the extent to which he described his fiction in terms of architecture, and his frequent, often utopian, metaphors of architecture in envisaging a new world (for instance in a letter he describes nation as ‘a great architecture of living people’ [2L 379]). The chapter will also locate these ideas within late Edwardian and Georgian, as well as early modernist, literary contexts and examine how Lawrence’s work can be situated in relation to some of his contemporaries’ responses to architecture, especially in light of the emergence of modern architecture.