Writing about D. H. Lawrence has traditionally been infused with a myth of the individual wrought in epic proportions. With the exception of suicides such as Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath, whose deaths have too often been the inscribers of their lives and the critical filter through which their work is read, perhaps no other twentieth-century writer has been so strongly interpreted through the lustre of biography. Lawrence's textual output was large, especially so since he lived only to the age of 44. His life has been glorified as both adventurous and scandalous. His marriage was passionate and stormy, he circled the world, living and writing in a number of exotic locations, he was accused of spying and obscenity, he both abandoned and affirmed the influence of his working-class English roots.

These elements form the components of a compelling lifenarrative upon which the history of readings of Lawrence has been pinned. It has, for instance, been almost impossible to read Sons and Lovers without some reference to its biographical bedrock: Lawrence's own intense Oedipal relationship with his mother, his development as an artist and estrangement from his class, and his relationship with his adolescent love, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in the novel). Political and sexual attitudes within the text, even those emerging from the mouths of characters, have been identified directly as the political and sexual attitudes of the author. Critics who might otherwise take the utmost care to avoid directly ascribing nebulous textual meaning to specific authorial source are still happy to write that Lawrence is Rupert Birkin (from Women in Love), is Paul Morel (from Sons and Lovers), is Aaron Sisson (from Aaron's Rod). The two primary movements in critical theory this century which have argued against attributing authorial intention to the text – I. A. Richards's practical criticism of the 1930s, and the ‘death of the author’ poststructuralism following, in particular, Roland Barthes's work in the 1960s and 1970s – seem to have had little impact on readings of Lawrence. Here the great man and his meanings have stood full square behind each sentence. This, despite the fact that it was Lawrence who wrote ‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale’.