“You can't lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You've always got yourself on your hands in the end…” Written in the years following World War I and set in postwar England and Italy, Lawrence's 1921 novel 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, one Aaron Sisson, 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. The work masterfully combines Lawrence's reservations about the growing industrialization of English society and his deep concern with the demands of an inner, freer self at risk of being crushed by its associated existential crisis. D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930), one of the greatest English authors, transformed the art of fiction. The author of numerous classic novels, poems and short stories, including Women In Love, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he is considered to be a central figure in the development of the modern novel.