On Rachel Cusk and D. H. Lawrence

With the publication of her novel Second Place in 2021, a rewriting of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos, a broad public of critics and reviewers was forced to contend with what attentive readers of the English novelist Rachel Cusk have long known: her deep and abiding interest in D. H. Lawrence. Precisely because that interest was now inescapable, many may have assumed that Second Place marked the work in which she had somehow settled her debt with the precursor, once and for all. The result, so far, has been to leave Cusk’s interest in Lawrence both over- and underestimated: taken too literally in the work that made it overt, yet neglected in her earlier writing.