When the shadow of F. R. Leavis's great tradition passed across the work of D.H. Lawrence, it fixed, for a generation, Lawrence's reputation as a ‘religious, earnest, suffering man’, to quote Lawrence's own description of himself to Edward Garnett (ii. 165). That emphasis on moral earnestness was central to the creation of the canon of what most critics agree are Lawrence's greatest novels – Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, Even critics who disagreed with Leavis's evaluation of Lawrence accepted his understanding that Lawrence's reputation rests on a moral vision, however much they might, like many feminist critics, have disagreed with Leavis's belief in the moral centrality of that vision.
For most readers, the establishment of the canon of three great novels inevitably diminished the work after Women in Love,Leavis himself diagnosed a problem with Lawrence's development, suggesting that Lawrence ‘wrote his later books far too hurriedly’. Among those critics who consider the later novels, few admire The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, The Boy in the Bush, The Plumed Serpent, Critics who choose to study the later novels are most often critical or apologetic, arguing – like Judith Ruderman – that these works ‘it is hoped, will never be considered Lawrence's finest’. If readers have seen Lawrence as a novelist whose reputation is based primarily on his moral vision, then they have also judged his long fiction after Women in Love, with the problematic exception of Lady Chatterley's Lover, as not only undistinguished but – in its political and moral positions – preposterous. Most readers outside of Lawrence's most devoted followers have simply ignored his later work.