invited Lawrence to his house in London. It was through Hueffer that Lawrence met Edward Garnett, a man who would champion his writing in London literary circles and fortify his heart during difficult emotional times. Lawrence wrote in a letter to his friend Ernest Collings dated November 1912 that Hueffer “discovered I was a genius—don’t be alarmed, Hueffer would discover anything if he wanted to—” (Letters). But in reality it was Chambers who first recognized Lawrence’s literary talents and who first encouraged him to write what “he was urged to ... from within” (Chambers, p. 89).

Lawrence tried his hand at writing prose. “The usual plan is to take two couples and develop their relationships,” he said on a walk with Chambers. “Most of George Eliot’s are on that plan. Anyhow, I don’t want a plot, I should be bored with it. I shall try two couples for a start” (Chambers, p. 103). Lawrence wrote The White Peacock on that plan, creating two couples and exploring their relationship. He sent Chambers pages of the manuscript as he wrote them and she, in turn, offered her criticisms. So intense was their collaboration that, upon the publication of The White Peacock in 1911, Lawrence wrote Chambers, “I its creator, you its nurse.”

The pair mostly avoided the topic of romance and sex, although gradually, as they grew through adolescence and into maturity, the issue asserted itself. Lawrence had girlfriends outside of their relationship, even going so far as to propose to one while on a train, but Chambers always occupied a primary position in his heart. “It’s like this,” Lawrence told Chambers, “some strands of your nature are knitted with some strands of mine, and we cannot be parted” (Chambers, p. 141). Later he told the girl that she was necessary to him, the “anvil on which I have hammered myself out....” (Chambers, p. 152).

Despite, or perhaps because of, the obvious mental, emotional, and spiritual connection between the two, Lawrence’s mother disapproved of Chambers. Her antipathy created an atmosphere so charged (Chambers described it as “strung-up” and “tight”) that the girl grew to dislike visiting the Lawrence home. Though Lawrence and Chambers avoided the topic of romance and sex, the issue asserted itself Mrs. Lawrence forced the question upon her son, and Lawrence, bringing the moment to its crisis, talked to Chambers. He told her that he could not bring himself to love her as “a man should love a wife” because, as he explained, between mother love and romantic love, the blood tie was the stronger of the two. “I can’t make myself love you, can I?” he cruelly asked Chambers. “I can’t plant a little love-tree in my heart” (Chambers, p. 141). The situation, as Chambers described it, was simply that while loving his mother with an almost romantic passion, he had nothing left to give a lover. “They tore me from you, the love of my life,” Lawrence remorsefully wrote to Chambers in a letter from March 1911. “It was the slaughter of the fetus in the womb” (Letters).

Mrs. Lawrence grew fatally ill with cancer during the fall and winter of 1910 as Lawrence’s first novel went into its final proofing stage. She died before she saw the novel in print. Lost in the world without his mother, Lawrence passed into a period of hopelessness and despair. Her death, he wrote, had taken from him all his spontaneous capacity for joy. “The only antidote is work,” he wrote in a letter to his sister in March 1911. “Heaven’s—how I do but slog. It gets the days over, at any rate” (Letters).

Lawrence was not content with his first book. “Publishers take no notice of a first novel. They know that nearly anybody can write one novel, if he can write at all, because it’s about himself. A second novel’s a step further.” The Trespasser, his second novel, was published in 1912. “It’s the third that counts, though.... If [a novelist] can get over that ass’s bridge he’s a writer, he can go on” (Chambers, p. 189).

Lawrence conceived of Sons and Lovers, originally titled “Paul Morel,” during his mother’s sickness. With her death, he began working at it with a vengeance. He had mixed feelings about it and the progress he was making. “I am afraid it will be a terrible novel,” he wrote to Louise Burrows in March 1911. “But if I can keep it to my idea and feeling, it will be a great one” (Letters). In a different letter from