D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence appears in the account as a novelist whose confidence in his authority on gender and desire shapes his hostile portrayals of Dora Carrington. Through fictional figures associated with her, his writing recasts an artist as an object of caricature and, in a later story, links that caricature to sexual violence and suicide.

Identity and Context

Lawrence is described as deeply preoccupied with the subject of men and women, and as assured of his own authority on it. He accused Dora Carrington, an artist, of hating what he regarded as real men. The account sets that accusation beside his fiction, where the women associated with Carrington are not treated as complex artists in their own right but become targets of sexualized caricature.

Fictional Portrayals

In Women in Love, Lawrence gives one of the women a name resembling Carrington’s and presents her as pretty and deceptively innocent-looking, while casting her as sexually transgressive. The character is an artist’s model rather than an artist. That distinction sharpens the episode’s contrast: Carrington’s identity as an artist is displaced by a fictional figure defined through appearance, sexuality, and her relation to artistic labor.

Years later, Lawrence wrote a short story featuring another caricature that the account says appears to have been based on Carrington. In that story, the woman is subjected to sexual violence and dies by suicide. The episode extends the earlier pattern into a far more severe fictional outcome, without establishing that the story is a direct portrait of Carrington.

Narrative Significance

Lawrence’s role is defined by the gap between his stated confidence about gender and the reductive forms through which Carrington is represented in his fiction. The two examples move from a sexually charged caricature in a novel to a figure subjected to violence and suicide in a later story; together, they show how the account frames his writing as repeatedly transforming Carrington into material for male-authored fiction. The evidence identifies the later character only as apparently based on her, preserving a distinction between literary resemblance and a confirmed model.