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Cambridge Companion: D. H. Lawrence Anne Fernihough. The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xx + 292 pp. Cloth $54.95 Paper $19.95
ANNE FERNIHOUGH'S Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence joins several dozen other Cambridge Companions. The collection is organized, as are others in the series, with a section offering essays on individual texts, or generic categories such as poetry or drama, followed by a section with more global issues such as Lawrence and modernism or psychoanalysis. Because the collection is structured according to an established format, this "companion" does not confront two critical questions: Is it actually feasible to construct a "companion to" a writer whose literary productivity is as diverse as Lawrence's? And if such a companion is aimed toward a generalist reader, or perhaps even an undergraduate student audience, how might its contributors most effectively "introduce" the work of a prolific writer like Lawrence?
Furthermore, such a companion to Lawrence faces the problem of how to accommodate the general perception that when Lawrence is studied at all in the classroom it is often to point out his quite impossible views. Linda Ruth Williams has commented: "Lawrence, perhaps more than any other writer, is feminism's bÃate noire, the monster it loves to hate." Fernihough seems well aware that even the beginning student of literature might need to be reassured that "reading and writing about Lawrence can be a bewildering and often problematic enterprise." She points to the essays of several contributors as efforts toward confronting the "problems" readers face. Marianna Torgovnick, for example, focuses on the ways in which readers of Lawrence divide themselves into diametrically opposed groups, who accept his views uncritically or reject them completely, something of an oversimplification. The latter camp includes many (non)readers or former readers who sniffily pronounce their inability/refusal to read/teach Lawrence. Occasionally, academics will say, Oh, I've outgrown Lawrence.
"Texts," the first section, is bent on "covering" Lawrence's literary production by surveying his work. Thus, the first chapter discusses the relatively insignificant first two novels (one wonders if anyone is still reading The Trespasser) and gives Sons and Lovers very short shriftÂ-basically, two pages. Torgovnick seems to have been assigned about the same length for The Rainbow, a novel which...