She was also pressing on with her own novel, and many references in Lawrence’s letters show the interest with which he had followed its progress. By the autumn of 1916 it was finished) and she took it with her to Cornwall where she and Donald stayed some time with the Lawrences, and it was much discussed, Lawrence was by then working on Women in Love, and as a result the name of one of the characters in Open The Door! (Sholto Bannerman) found its way into his novel until she made him alter it, and it became Donald Gilchrist.

This was when the manuscript of Women in Love reached Catherine and Donald a month or so later. Donald read it for libel (he had now qualified as a barrister) and Catherine altered Gudrun’s clothes as well as making a number of stylistic points, all of which Lawrence accepted. But she did not like the novel, and reproached him for writing about “people so far removed from the general run, people so artistic and ‘spoiled’, that it would hardly matter what they said.” Lawrence’s defence, that it was only by the study of upper-class putrescence “that one could discover whither the general run of mankind, the great unconscious mass, was tending”, did not convince her. The difference led to her itemizing his new friends of Garsington and Bloomsbury (friendships the novel in fact destroyed) and telling him he would have to work “for those who could not understand him till long afterwards, and he would have to be alone, all through and in the end alone”.

This difference did not end their friendship, and he continued to encourage her about Open The Door! “Don’t hate Joanna,” he wrote, “She is young. She will grow up. But the hideous wasters who will only rot in the bud, how I hate them. But Joanna is all right. She is a kind of dead-nettle, who looks like a pure weed, and comes out with very quaint and bunchy flowers at the last minute.”

Thus Open The Door! was finished five years after it was first thought of and was submitted to Lawrence’s publisher Duckworth, who refused it on the grounds of length. She then sent it to Melrose, who not only took it but gave it a prize, half of which she offered to Lawrence, who declined it.

The novel was published in 1920, but if, as is usual, one takes the First World War as a Great Divide, it belongs both in conception and flavour to the pre-war world; although oddly enough it owes nothing of its structure or feeling to the conventions of Victorian or Edwardian times. Its characters are not imprisoned by anything but themselves, and the liberation they seek is not social but personal.