Written in the years following World War I and set in postwar England and Italy,
Aaron's Rod questions many of the accepted social and political institutions of
Lawrence's generation, and raises issues as valid for our own time as they were
for his. The novel's hero is an Everyman who flees the destruction in England
and his failing marriage and who, like Lawrence himself, becomes absorbed in
discovering and understanding the nature of the political and religious
ideologies that shaped western civilization. Aaron's Rod was completed in 1921
and was censored by both Lawrence's American and English publishers. The
Cambridge Edition, based on the only authoritative, surviving