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Edward Garnett's Revisions to the Galley Proofs
When Edward Garnett checked through these proofs before forwarding them to Lawrence, he directed his attention to the early morning swim taken by Clara and Paul in chapter XIII. Lawrence had written two similar sentences a few paragraphs apart:
"OO" she said, hugging her breasts between her arms, "it's cold!"
. . . She gathered her breasts between her arms, cringing, laughing.
"OO, it will be so cold!" she said.
He bent forward and kissed the two white glistening globes she cradled. (MS p. 491; E1 p. 358).
Garnett had already censored the passage when preparing the manuscript for the printer by changing the last sentence to "He kissed her neck." Now, on the proofs, he deleted the first of Clara's exclamations, and changed "gathered" to "hugged". He may have done this to remove a repetition, but it seems likely that his motivation was also censorship. Given how slight were the revisions that constituted censorship in The White Peacock, such as the removal of "have a real bellyful of me" in favour of "be really glutted with me",[13] it is quite possible that Garnett judged "gathered" to suggest an image of Clara presenting her breasts to Paul and "hugged" of covering them up.
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