This paper sees D.H. Lawrence’s The Ladybird (1923) as part of a developing discourse of disenchantment which followed the First World War. Literary critics and historians tend to see disenchantment, or disillusionment, as a response to unspecified aspects of wartime conduct, and all too rarely consider their definition of this persistent term. I see disenchantment not only as a product of the war, but also as an ongoing condition of England in the early twentieth century: of culture, of life in the industrialised city, of fears of invasion. I invoke contemporary authors such as C.F.G. Masterman and Max Weber to illustrate that disenchantment existed before the war, during it, and endured after it. Lawrence is one of the early writers to start to reinterpret the conflict, moving away from an understanding based on heroism and glorious sacrifice towards the disenchanted mode more readily associated with the War Books Boom of 1929-30.

Disenchantment cannot simply be a combatant response to the war, as is often posited. Lawrence composed works which are as bilious about the war, as disenchanted, as anyone who fought in the conflict. ‘The Ladybird’ is a complex novella which addresses ongoing concerns about the bodily health of the world and its inhabitants, about the possibility of post-war recovery, about gender politics, and about the enmity between generations. I argue that Lawrence’s post-war writings about the conflict benefit from being understood in the light of other literary and theoretical texts which share concerns about decline, decay and entropy.