LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
Sta,—Professor Wilson Knight's letter in your last Issue calls for a word of explanation from me. Perhaps I may quote from a postscript to my original article which I sent to Encounter, too late to be printed with it : `Readers who, though convinced of the correct- ness of my interpretation, are inclined to play down its importance, might well consult an article by Professor G. Wilson Knight, "Lawrence, Joyce and Powys," in the current number of Essays in Criticism (which I did not myself see until my own article was in proof). To this critic, "the night of sensual passion" represent the climax of an anal obsession on Lawrence's part, the development of which he traces though Women in Love and seeks to illumine by a potpourri of references to the "posterior locations" drawn from the unbridled sexual fantasies of Ulysses. Professor Knight's in- vocation of one author to explain another seems to me unhelpful . . . but what does emerge con- vincingly from his lurid and confused excursus is the importance of the part played in Lawrence's thought and feeling about sex by the clement in Lady Chatterley's Lover that I have drawn attention to.'
Oxford
JOHN SPARROW
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