of individual scenes", many also criticised his "humorless obsession" with saving Mexico and the world. Lawrence's biographer Harry T. Moore states that The Plumed Serpent received negative reviews from P. C. Kennedy in the New Statesman, the journalist Katherine Anne Porter in the New York Herald Tribune, and the novelist L. P. Hartley in the Saturday Review. He adds that additional negative reviews appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, which described the novel as "feeble", and The Spectator, which described it as "verbose". However, Moore writes that it received a more mixed assessment, discussing both its good and bad aspects, from the poet Edwin Muir in The Nation and Athenaeum. Moore himself maintained that The Plumed Serpent could be considered a "magnificent failure" and that it was "a greater achievement than the smoother work of the lesser authors celebrated at that time." He considered its first six chapters to be its best part, writing that they contain "wonderful prose". He also noted that the novel sold well. Maddox writes that the novel received a negative review from Charles Marriott in The Manchester Guardian, who deplored its failure to produce convincing characterizations, a response similar to that of Hartley in the Saturday Review. According to Maddox, Porter considered the novel inferior to Lawrence's earlier work Sons and Lovers (1913), and believed that the difference in quality between the two works showed "the catastrophe that has overtaken Lawrence." The Plumed Serpent received a mixed review from Time, which described it as "a strange, compelling state of affairs rather than a story", and wrote that it reflected the "physico-mysticism", and preoccupation with sexual psychology, of its author. Time wrote that Lawrence's work "moves many profoundly, puzzles others, and revolts the squeamish." Donald Douglas wrote in The Nation that The Plumed Serpent contains "passages of miraculous wonder and words like arrows tipped with light borrowed from the sun" and that "Lawrence has all his old infallible and inexhaustible knowledge of woman's nature and his Indians bear all the fascination of an alien life perfectly understood." Later assessments of The Plumed Serpent include those of F. B. Pinion, who considered it the most ambitious and successful of Lawrence's novels written after Women in Love (1920). Brett Neilson compared The Plumed Serpent to Women in Love, arguing that they imagined "the primitive" in similar ways and that both involved the theme of an "eternal conjunction between