D. H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativity

On the 15th of June 1921, during his stay in Baden-Baden, Germany, British novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) encountered the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Lawrence read an English translation of Relativity: The Special and General Theory, which had been published in the previous year. The very next day he wrote: “Einstein isn’t so metaphysically marvellous, but I like him for taking out the pin which fixed down our fluttering little physical universe” (4L 37). Lawrence’s first response to Einstein is ambivalent, for his reading of works by Victorian relativists such as Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, William James, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel had helped him foster his own concept of relativity, while his representations of relativity had interacted with modern artists including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Umberto Boccioni. This book shows Lawrence’s exploration of relativity in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European cultural climate of Modernism and examines his representation of relativity in Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922) and The Fox (original version, 1920; revised version, 1922).