Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him a controversial reputation; he endured contemporary persecution and public misrepresentation of his creative work throughout his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile that he described as a "savage enough pilgrimage".

In addition, a teaching colleague, Helen Corke, gave him access to her intimate diaries about an unhappy love affair, which formed the basis of The Trespasser, his second novel.

Despite his early enthusiasm for Davies' work, Lawrence's view cooled after reading Foliage; whilst in Italy, he also disparaged Nature Poems, calling them "so thin, one can hardly feel them".

[15] After the couple returned to Italy, staying in a cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia Lawrence wrote the first draft of what would later be transformed into two of his best-known novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, in which unconventional female characters take centre stage.

The Rainbow follows three generations of a Nottinghamshire farming family from the pre-industrial to the industrial age, focusing particularly on a daughter, Ursula, and her aspiration for a more fulfilling life than that of becoming a housebound wife.

Both novels explore grand themes and ideas that challenged conventional thought on the arts, politics, economic growth, gender, sexual experience, friendship, and marriage.

[18] In a 1913 letter, he writes, "I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not...."[19] He is also quoted as saying, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.

Frieda's German parentage and Lawrence's open contempt for militarism caused them to be viewed with suspicion and live in near-destitution during wartime Britain; this may have contributed to The Rainbow being suppressed and investigated for its alleged obscenity in 1915.

Many of these places appear in Lawrence's writings, including The Lost Girl (for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction), Aaron's Rod and the fragment titled Mr Noon (the first part of which was published in the Phoenix anthology of his works, and the entirety in 1984).

During a short residence in Darlington, Western Australia, Lawrence met local writer Mollie Skinner, with whom he coauthored the novel The Boy in the Bush.

This stay was followed by a brief stop in the small coastal town of Thirroul, New South Wales, during which Lawrence completed Kangaroo, a novel about local fringe politics that also explored his wartime experiences in Cornwall.

Lawrence had several times discussed the idea of setting up a utopian community with several of his friends, having written in 1915 to Willie Hopkin, his old socialist friend from Eastwood: "I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go, and some real decency … a place where one can live simply, apart from this civilisation … [with] a few other people who are also at peace and happy and live, and understand and be free.…"[30]It was with this in mind that they made for Taos, New Mexico, a Pueblo town where many white "bohemians" had settled, including Mabel Dodge Luhan, a prominent socialite.

This short work describes the tumultuous relationship of D. H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, artist Dorothy Brett, and Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan.

[32] While in the U.S., Lawrence rewrote and published Studies in Classic American Literature, a set of critical essays begun in 1917 and described by Edmund Wilson as "one of the few first-rate books that have ever been written on the subject".

In addition, Lawrence completed new fictional works, including The Boy in the Bush, The Plumed Serpent, St Mawr, The Woman who Rode Away, The Princess and other short stories.

The return to Italy allowed him to renew old friendships; during these years he was particularly close to Aldous Huxley, who was to edit the first collection of Lawrence's letters after his death, along with a memoir.

[35] After Lawrence visited local archaeological sites (particularly old tombs) with artist Earl Brewster in April 1927, his collected essays inspired by the excursions were published as Sketches of Etruscan Places, a book that contrasts the lively past with Benito Mussolini's fascism.

Lawrence's best-known short stories include "The Captain's Doll", "The Fox", "The Ladybird", "Odour of Chrysanthemums", "The Princess", "The Rocking-Horse Winner", "St Mawr", "The Virgin and the Gypsy" and "The Woman who Rode Away".

"[41] His best-known poems are probably those dealing with nature such as those in the collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers, including the Tortoise poems, and "Snake", one of his most frequently anthologised, displays some of his most frequent concerns: those of man's modern distance from nature and subtle hints at religious themes.In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree I came down the steps with my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He called one collection of poems Pansies, partly for the simple ephemeral nature of the verse, but also as a pun on the French word panser, to dress or bandage a wound.

[42] In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence's responses to writers like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe also shed light on his craft.

The Daily Express claimed, "Fight with an Amazon represents a hideous, bearded man holding a fair-haired woman in his lascivious grip while wolves with dripping jaws look on expectantly, [this] is frankly indecent".

Gwen John, reviewing the exhibition in Everyman, spoke of Lawrence's "stupendous gift of self-expression" and singled out The Finding of Moses, Red Willow Trees and Boccaccio Story as "pictures of real beauty and great vitality".

Years after his death, his widow Frieda asked artist and friend Joseph Glasco to arrange an exhibition of Lawrence's paintings, which he discussed with his gallerist Catherine Viviano.

Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty".

The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".

This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom."

[49] Critics such as Terry Eagleton[50] have argued that Lawrence was right-wing due to his lukewarm attitude to democracy, which he intimated would tend towards the leveling down of society and the subordination of the individual to the sensibilities of the "average" man.

In his letters to Bertrand Russell around 1915, Lawrence voiced his opposition to enfranchising the working class and his hostility to the burgeoning labour movements, and disparaged the French Revolution, referring to "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" as the "three-fanged serpent."

Philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari found in Lawrence's critique of Sigmund Freud an important precursor of anti-Oedipal accounts of the unconscious that has been much influential.