The immense creative effort that lay behind the two great novels we have just considered obviously contributes to the feeling of imaginative exhaustion which so many critics have noticed in almost all Lawrence's subsequent work. So automatically is the assumption sometimes made that the later Lawrence alternates mystic obscurity in some writings with prosaic didacticism in others that we need to remind ourselves in the next few chapters that no great artist ever contents himself with repetition of his past achievements. Lawrence seldom stayed in one place for long, either in his life or in his work. He did not want to write Women in Love twice over, but in searching for the new direction that his writing might take no clear avenues opened before him. In moments of such uncertainty Lawrence invariably returned to his roots. Over half of The Lost Girl has an industrial English setting. Here Lawrence examines, for the first time in a novel, the social attitudes of the petite bourgeoisie, in particular their effect on a young girl awakening to her own sexuality. He contrasts small-town morality with the instinctual behaviour of the non-industrial man.

In looking for a new way to write, the Lawrence of 1917–19 saw two possibilities: to abandon fiction altogether or to write as every other novelist seemed to be doing in England at the time: less spiritually, less enquiringly than was his gift.