‘Being loyal to Lawrence,’ writes Wilson, ‘especially as a woman, has always required some explanation, so here is mine’:

I liked his fierce certainties: his belief in the novel as ‘the one bright book in life’, his belief in himself as right and the rest of us as wrong, his insistence that the unconscious was an organ like the liver; I liked the fact that his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world ...

‘I like his solidarity with the instincts,’ she concludes, ‘his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings.’

Note the Lawrentian drag Wilson wears in these lines. The certitude, the hurtling progress, the repetitions, pile-ons, and run-ons, the paradoxes and bathetic swivels. She did the same thing with Thomas De Quincey in Guilty Thing (2016), borrowing from that Romantic essayist his exquisitely addled, circumlocutory style to shape her own: arguing at the time that, though there had been several fine biographies of De Quincey, there had never been a Dequinceyan one.

Wilson is also fascinating for the way she reads her subjects in spatial terms. In De Quincey’s case, the biographer was interested in the architectonic aspects of his writing: the way houses and streets provided the venues for his restless, haunted imagination to roam. For Lawrence, the life and career are read on a vertical instead of horizontal axis: a journey from subterranean seams beneath the English midlands – where in 1885 David Herbert Lawrence was born, the son of a miner – to the high country of New Mexico, his last and only settled home, where his cremated ashes were, according to Wilson, possibly lost, scattered, mixed with cement, or eaten by his wife and lovers.

A Dante-esque progress, then: ascent from Inferno to Paradiso: from the hell of Europe in World War I to the bright, clean air of the New World. Though, as with the Florentine’s great poem, it’s the infernal sections that readers prefer. In that spirit, Wilson concentrates on the decade, from 1915 to 1925, when Lawrence enjoyed his most brilliant creative efflorescence, as well as his most intense personal battles.

Burning Man opens with Lawrence, aged thirty, in the literal midst of a dark wood: London’s Hampstead Heath, where he is living with his German wife, Frieda, since the outbreak of hostilities. At night, war Zeppelins hover over the couple as searchlights strafe the sky. A man of Lawrence’s sensitivity could not remain unmoved by the historical mise en scène. He viewed it as the bursting of a cosmos – as part of Milton’s war in heaven.

Wilson sketches a deft and acute picture of the moment. As the staid, settled, self-satisfied perfection of the pre-war world was being blasted in the trenches of France and elsewhere, a new world was coming into being – and Lawrence, Wilson argues, was its slender, bearded prophet. Like Percy Shelley, he was a vegetarian, sexually anarchistic, a hellraiser who was ‘lethal to women’. Unlike Shelley, he was a modern in his resistance to form – in his belief that reality had no shape and was merely a series of accidents, a form of picaresque. With Walt Whitman, Lawrence saw the self not as an accumulation of inherited traits, but as the site of auto-revelation.

Having followed the couple to wartime Cornwall, Wilson introduces us to the perverse, impassioned tenor of their relationship (‘What was increasingly apparent about the Lawrences’ marriage is that it was a piece of theatre, performed before an audience … [while] other men might beat their wives in private and perform their affection in public, Lawrence beat his wife in public and was affectionate when he thought no one was looking’) and to the vivid cast of bohemians and aristocrats who made up their set.

Wilson is at her best in the thicket of social relations that marked Britain during the war and Europe in the conflict’s wake. Something in the order of seventeen memoirs about Lawrence appeared in the years immediately after the writer’s death, and this density of autobiographical detail allows Wilson to generate hologram-like recall of certain moments: brief affairs, for instance, described not just from the perspective of each lover, but from their respective partners, as well as adjacent friends or enemies.

Such was the incestuous and back-biting nature of this Anglo milieu, it’s a relief to see Lawrence and Frieda escape it for the sun and sea of Southern Europe. Wilson is splendid on the expansions and ecstasies vouchsafed to Lawrence by this new freedom:

Lawrence finally left England on 13 November 1919, the fourth anniversary of the destruction of The Rainbow and the year that saw the births of the German Nazi Party, the Italian Fascist Party and the Irish Free State … Through the window of the train the snow on the Downs hung like a shroud, and from the stern of the boat from Folkestone to Boulogne, England looked like ‘a grey, dreary grey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with her dead grey cliffs, and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above’.

‘He was flying south for winter,’ writes Wilson. ‘Like Aristotle, Lawrence believed that moving south was moving up, nearer to the sun.’

Wilson traces that ascent in interesting ways. She addresses his novels, stories, poems, and criticism with Lawrence’s own brand of defiant pith (‘“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”: Sea and Sardinia has the finest opening line of any travel book’), and quotes him in ways that show him in the best possible light:

The language of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, said W.H. Auden, is so transparent that we forget the poet is there: we simply see what Lawrence sees. But Birds, Beasts and Flowers also reminds us of what Lawrence was like when he was there, in the form of his better self, walking through the woods and meadows, noting that wet almond trees look like iron sticking out of the earth and that young cyclamens prick up their ears when they wake, ‘like delicate very-young greyhound bitches’.

But Wilson does not resile for a second from putting the boot in as the years go on and Lawrence the shouter, mad and misogynist, begins to crowd out the nature-loving, sun-worshipping forest Pan. However much this may be a narrative of ascension, Lawrence’s reactionary hysteria is more present in the latter years – partly in his lustreless progress through Ceylon, Australia, and the South Pacific; and particularly in his sojourns in New Mexico, rubbing shoulders with stage Indians and white saviours, with their drugs and free love and proto-New Age claptrap – and Wilson dutifully acknowledges it. Though she does play one trump card, referring to the inexorable advance of Lawrence’s tuberculosis, when she quotes the father of the playwright John Mortimer: ‘I’m always angry when I’m dying.’

Like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the shadow of D.H. Lawrence (1997), Burning Man is a meta-biography of the kind that can only be pulled off when the more measured and punctilious lives of Lawrence have already been written. It takes the form of an infinitely extended riff, fascinated by those books in the Lawrence canon (bar Kangaroo, which is passed over almost completely) that are less known or regarded, and intrigued by those characters in Lawrence’s orbit who have been over-looked.

The result is a brilliant, convoluted, mannerist approach – lovely on the page, often thrilling in its daring – that perhaps honours the spirit of Lawrence more than it does the biographical letter.