At last things are looking up a bit for D H Lawrence. Four decades after the Second Wave feminist critique brought his reputation crashing down from its dizzy 1960s heights, today’s students come to him as though to a blank sheet. If they don’t know much about him, at least they know no ill of him. Critics are making a counter-case for Lawrence as a feminist, just as the 2011 BBC Four adaptation of Women in Love did. BBC One is adapting Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D H Lawrence, ongoing since 1979 and now approaching the fortieth volume, is finally almost finished, making Lawrence the most meticulously edited writer of the early 20th century.

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