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Lawrence saw boredom as a distinctively modern problem that grew out of a double sense of time as both empty and excessive. Identifying boredom with the masses and industrial society, however, also led him to explore how boredom extends into space. Focusing on Lawrence’s representation of the English Midlands, this article traces the effects of that spatialized boredom in various novels including Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I examine the relationship between monotony and boredom, as well as the prickly question of whether Lawrence represents the masses as subjects who experience such states or, instead, as objects who precipitate them in others. The last section considers how an alternative, and more positive, conception of monotony enters Lawrence’s depiction of the natural world but also folds back into his portrait of modern industrial monotony.

When Lawrence met Aldous Huxley for the first time in London in December 1915, he invited him on the spot to join the colony he planned to launch in Florida. “I like Huxley very much,” Lawrence told their mutual patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell. “He will come to Florida.” Huxley’s account was more hedged, but he remained interested in joining Lawrence and company temporarily. The colony, of course, never transpired, but this meeting provided a venue for the exchange of utopian hopes, as well as skepticism, that expressed themselves in the writings of both authors during the next several years. Indeed Lawrence and Huxley frequently responded critically and satirically to each other’s utopian and dystopian impulses – to each other’s acknowledgment of human tragedy but also their efforts to resist it.