He soon abandoned teaching, middle-class aspirations, and the social-sexual decorums of his time. In a famous love affair, he fled to the Continent with another man's wife. Most of Lawrence's remaining years until his death in his early forties were marked by frequent travel, a socially marginal lifestyle, grave illness, and intense art and argument. Declassed and deracinated, he had become something of a bohemian-artist cynosure and an obsessive sexual and social critic-prophet against his times.
Much of Lawrence's writing is autobiographical, though some of his best works are not directly so. One of his earliest stories, "The White Stocking" (originally written about 1907 and revised for his first story collection, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, 1914), shows some of his significant powers. This tale about a young lower-middle-class married couple probes, in a heightened realist manner, some of the emotional extremity underlying even a positive relationship. Though loving her young man, the young woman has erotically played with her sexually predatory middle-aged factory boss before her marriage--"perverse desire." He had once pocketed at a party a white stocking she had "mistakenly" taken with her for a handkerchief, a metaphor for her sexual flaunting. After her marriage, the roué sends her a gift on Valentine's Day, which she keeps secret from her husband.
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