One must suppose that some correspondence, now lost, with D. H. Lawrence preceded her first meeting with him in June 1914, since it was clearly prearranged and their friendship ripened very quickly. Lawrence, who had come to England with Frieda to get married, did not reach London till the latter part of June, and by the end of that month he had not only met Catherine but was half-way through her novel. They were to remain close friends for the rest of Lawrence’s life, as some two hundred letters testify: one of the largest bodies of Lawrence’s huge correspondence to survive. Since he never kept letters, her side of the correspondence is lost; but two things are evident. She was never either the recipient or the victim of the wounding fury which Lawrence showered so liberally on and about most of his other friends. She was devoted to him, and perhaps saw more clearly than most his extraordinary originality. But as she records in her own life of him: “From beginning to end I had for Lawrence, as he well knew, a special kind of love and admiration which I never had for any other human being … But I felt also the need to save myself.” Lawrence knew about Greiffenhagen, as several passages in the letters make clear, and that may have entered into and stimulated the development of their early relationship; but they met at a moment when both were on the point of getting married. There was an instinctive puritanism in them both which each was quick to recognize (and sometimes to reproach the other for straying from). Lawrence married Frieda in July 1914, and Catherine married Donald early in 1915.

The novel which Lawrence read in the summer of 1914 was an early version of Open The Door!, not the book we now have. He covered the manuscript with annotations and criticisms, discussed it with her, and called for extensive rewriting. “Nearly all of it is marvellously good. It is only so incoherent … My stars, just you work at it and you’ll have a piece of work you need never feel ashamed of.” Beside this encouragement, his criticism of the style as “indirect and roundabout, stiff-kneed and stupid” merely seemed an invitation to try harder.

Lawrence, at that time, was working on The Rainbow, which came out in 1915 and was promptly prosecuted: but not before Catherine had reviewed it for the Glasgow Herald. She found it “a difficult review to write”, and although it contained a measure of criticism the praise in it caused her to take the precaution of seeing that it went to the printer without passing under the editorial eye. So she promptly lost her job – continuing in journalism, however, as assistant dramatic critic of the Observer.