Includes bibliographical references and index.

During the Great War, D. H. Lawrence changed from an optimistic socialist revolutionary to a misanthropic elitist preaching leadership. Cornelia Nixon shows that this change has a private sexual dimension that is always reflected in his subsequent political thinking. Whereas earlier works including The Rainbow) glorify sex, procreation, and the female, little-known essays contemporaneous with Women in Love (and to some extent that novel itself) favor transcendence of desire, subjection of the female, apotheosis of the male, and a male paramilitary hierarchy based on love. The erotic dimension of this shift suggests that fear of women and latent homosexuality are essential ingredients of the authoritorian reaction. Nixon revives the thesis that the anomie to which fascism and protofascism were responses was brought home to men not only by the public agitation for women's rights but also by the private sexual assertion of newly independent women.

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