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Lawrence once said of The White Peacock, “It is a first novel . . . publishers take no notice of a first novel.” His observation might well be extended to include critics and scholars who have generally ignored his first book. His later works have been discussed at length, but a lack of comment and study has kept The White Peacock from the status it richly deserves.
Many of the symbols and most of the themes and preoccupations of the later Lawrence are established in his first novel: his annunciation of paganism and his return-to-earth motif; his outrage at the humiliation man suffers before a woman-administered idealism. And a variety of themes and motives are stirring in The White Peacock; some are hinted at and dropped, some are partly developed, and almost reappear in Lawrence's maturer writing.
The interaction of man and his setting becomes almost the governing feature of Lawrence's first book. Lawrence did not ignore the predatoriness instinctive in both animals and men. We need to avoid sentimentalizing his view of nature. In this first novel the sense of the seasons passing, of terrain always changing and evolving, of weather and animal life at first harnessed by and then hostile to man, is a constant element in the novel, and a strong one, despite some immature lushness in the writing.