D.H. Lawrence and the Marriage Matrix: Intertextual Adventures in Conflict, Renewal, and Transcendence - Hardcover

Peter Balbert received his PhD from Cornell University, and is Professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where he served for sixteen years as Department Chair. He is the author of D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination and D. H. Lawrence and the Psychology of Rhythm, and the co-editor of D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. He has published more than fifty articles on modern and contemporary fiction and on university administration, and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, as Associate Editor of Planning for Higher Education, as a Contributing Editor of Academic Leader, and as a consultant for the National Institute for Research.

[Peter Balbert] balances "close reading, rhetorical analysis, and historical context." This attention to form is one of the strengths of the book. [...] Balbert's provocative readings are welcome additions to the critical record. The vast archive of biographical information about Lawrence allows Balbert to connect his readings to Lawrence's daily life - the places he lived, the people he saw, the books he read. [...] While every interpretation is a personal reading, Balbert makes his assumptions and judgments unusally explicit. Lawrence's willingness to write about intimate acts and feelings causes readers to feel very close to him. The more we know about his life, the more evidence we gather to confirm our understanding. But each of us finds a different man. In D.H. Lawrence and the Marriage Matrix, Peter Balbert has found a Lawrence who provides valued insight into the complexity of long relationships. --Joyce Wexler, Loyola University of Chicago; President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America D.H. Lawrence Review, 41.1 (2016)

Peter Balbert’s book provides a new and refreshing outlook on Lawrence’s work, a suggestive bridge between century-old considerations about marriage and contemporary echoes and resonances. Dwindling in popularity, relevance and esteem today, and losing its legal and social value, the institution of marriage cries out for renewal ‒ a key term in Balbert’s book, which identifies the “marriage matrix” as the motif, the basis, the foundation from which conflict, renewal and transcendence spring, and describes how this matrix shapes Lawrence’s work. [...] Balbert’s analysis of the notion of renewal, which is so crucial to Lawrence, proves illuminating. Projected onto the contemporary realm of academic research these chapters are a stimulus as well as a case study. Overall, this ambitious work by Peter Balbert offers so much more than it claims or than the reader anticipates. --Marina Ragachewskaya, Minsk State Linguistic University, Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society, 4:3 (2017)

D.H. Lawrence's abiding interest in the complex nature of marriage derives from his experience both as the child of a troubled marriage and a partner in an even more volatile one. Balbert considers in chronological order eight works, all completed during the last decade of Lawrence's life (1920-1928) each concerned with the "marriage matrix." [...] The marriage matrix, or matrices, repeatedly highlight "transitional periods of immaturity, depression, and codependency" which often correspond with analogous phases in Lawrence's chaotic marriage to Frieda Weekly. --Mary Lowe-Evans, Professor Emeritus, University of West Florida, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920