[From Great Modern Reading, Nelson Doubleday, 1943, p. 241:]

I have never thought Lawrence’s stories very good. I find them formless and verbose. He also, it seems, needed elbow room to express that view of life that fascinated so many of his readers and that to others, myself included, seemed distorted. To my mind it was the view of a sick man of abnormal irritability, whose nature was warped by poverty and cankered with a rankling envy. He may have had a streak of genius; I don’t know; I have a notion that he was a better poet than prose writer. He had a wonderful felicity for stringing words together, and you can go through his works and find sentence after sentence of ravishing beauty, but the general effect, to me at least, is lush and airless. But it would be unfair to neglect a writer whom many good judges thought the most original and powerful novelist of his generation, and so I am giving you a couple of letters* that I find characteristic, interesting and sympathetic.

* To T. D. D., 7 July, 1914 & Lady Ottoline Morrell, 14 May, 1915. Ed.