This essay assesses Bowen’s relationship to the English author D. H. Lawrence, and suggests that in view of the chronological overlap in their careers, the latter was effectively a contemporary as well as a forerunner. Bowen regarded Lawrence as a major author but also identified with him as an ‘outsider’ to cosmopolitan English literary circles. Both novelists are transitional figures, comfortable with the novelistic legacies of nineteenth-century fictional realism but moving towards formal experimentation, while tuning their work to modernist preoccupations with psychology and sexuality. Their interests aligned in the exploration of female subjectivity and the shifting gender politics of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s landmark novel Women in Love, with its programmatic positioning of two sisters caught between the inherited shapes of English Victorian romance and the pull of a modern European independence, provides a persuasive template for Bowen in her structured pairings of women across several works, including an unpublished story titled ‘Women in Love’. The two writers are linked, finally, by their respective responses to the world at war, with Bowen hailing Lawrence as a guide to her literary navigation of wartime London.