Lawrence, D. H.

Lawrence, D. H. David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930), born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, one of five children of a miner and an ex-schoolteacher. He grew up in considerable poverty and his ill-suited parents quarrelled continually. At 15 Lawrence was forced to give up his education and take a job for a short time as a clerk. He then became a pupil teacher, and subsequently took up a scholarship at Nottingham University College to study for a teacher's certificate.

His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), was followed by The Trespasser (1912). After the death of his mother he became seriously ill and gave up teaching. Sons and Lovers (1913) is a faithful autobiographical account of these early years. In 1912 he met Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), wife of his old professor at Nottingham; she was six years older than Lawrence and mother of three children. They fell in love and eloped to Germany; their life together was passionate and stormy. He spent the war years in England and formed friendships with A. Huxley, D. Garnett, Lady O. Morrell, J. M. Murry, K. Mansfield, Aldington, and B. Russell (with whom he was later to quarrel bitterly). His next novel, The Rainbow (1915), was seized by the police and declared obscene; his frankness about sex, and his use of four-letter words, was to keep him in constant trouble with the law. In 1917 he published a volume of poems, Look! We Have Come Through!, and in 1919 he and Frieda left for Italy. He had finished his novel Women in Love in 1916 but was unable to find a publisher until 1920 in New York, where an action against it failed, and 1921 in London. In 1920 The Lost Girl (begun before the war) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Aaron's Rod (1922), which shows the influence of Nietzsche, followed and the same year he began his serious travels, to Ceylon and Australia and finally to America, Australia (where he wrote Kangaroo, 1923), and Mexico, where he began The Plumed Serpent (1926). While on a visit to Old Mexico he was told that he was in an advanced state of tuberculosis. With Frieda he returned to Italy, settling finally near Florence at the Villa Mirenda where he finished Lady Chatterley's Lover. It was privately printed in Florence in 1928 and was finally published in unexpurgated editions in the United States and England over 30 years later.

Lawrence was a moralist, believing that modern man was in danger of losing his ability to experience the quality of life. Passionately involved with his characters and the physical world of nature, he wrote of them with a fresh immediacy and vividness. His reputation as a short story writer has always been high, many stories appearing first in small collections (The Prussian Officer, 1914; England, My England, 1922; The Woman Who Rode Away, 1928) and in a complete edition in 3 vols, 1955. His travel books are Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Palaces (1932).

In his poems Lawrence wanted to be free of the weight of formalism but not, as he said, to ‘dish up the fragments as a new substance’. His volumes include Love Poems (1913), Amores (1916), Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), Pansies (1929), Complete Poems (3 vols, 1957).

Other non-fiction works include Movements in European History (1921), Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and Apocalypse (1931). A first collection of The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (1932) was edited by A. Huxley. A new edition, ed. J. T. Boulton was published in seven volumes, 1979–93.