D H Lawrence

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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.

D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Lawrence), 1885-1930, English author, one of the primary shapers of 20th-century fiction.

Life

The son of a Nottingham coal miner, Lawrence was a sickly child, devoted to his refined but domineering mother, who insisted upon his education. He graduated from the teacher-training course at University College, Nottingham, in 1905 and became a schoolmaster in a London suburb. In 1909 some of his poems were published in the English Review, edited by Ford Madox Ford , who was also instrumental in the publication of Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911).

Lawrence eloped to the Continent in 1912 with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, a German noblewoman who was the wife of a Nottingham professor; they were married in 1914. During World War I the couple was forced to remain in England; Lawrence's outspoken opposition to the war and Frieda's German birth aroused suspicion that they were spies. In 1919 they left England, returning only for brief visits. Their nomadic existence was spent variously in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Australia, the United States (New Mexico), and Mexico. Lawrence died at the age of 45 of tuberculosis, a disease with which he had struggled for years.

Works

Lawrence believed that industrialized Western culture was dehumanizing because it emphasized intellectual attributes to the exclusion of natural or physical instincts. He thought, however, that this culture was in decline and that humanity would soon evolve into a new awareness of itself as being a part of nature. One aspect of this "blood consciousness" would be an acceptance of the need for sexual fulfillment. His three great novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1921), concern the consequences of trying to deny humanity's union with nature.

After World War I, Lawrence began to believe that society needed to be reorganized under one superhuman leader. The novels containing this theme— Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), and The Plumed Serpent (1926)—are all considered failures. Lawrence's most controversial novel is Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), the story of an English noblewoman who finds love and sexual fulfillment with her husband's gamekeeper. Because their lovemaking is described in intimate detail (for the 1920s), the novel caused a sensation and was banned in England and the United States until 1959.

All of Lawrence's novels are written in a lyrical, sensuous, often rhapsodic prose style. He had an extraordinary ability to convey a sense of specific time and place, and his writings often reflected his complex personality. Lawrence's works include volumes of stories, poems, and essays. He also wrote a number of plays, travel books such as Etruscan Places (1932), and volumes of literary criticism, notably Studies in Classic American Literature (1916).

Bibliography

See the Portable D. H. Lawrence, ed. by D. Trilling (1947); his collected letters (ed. with introduction by H. T. Moore, 1962); his complete poems, ed. by V. De Sola Pinto and F. W. Roberts (1977); biographies by J. M. Murray (1931), G. Trease (1973), H. T. Moore (rev. ed. 1974), J. Meyers (1990), P. Callow (1998 and 2003), and J. Worthen (2005), and series biography by J. Worthen (Vol. I, 1991), M. Kinkead-Weekes (Vol. II, 1996), and D. Ellis (Vol III., 1998); D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (1994) by B. Maddox; and The Cambridge Biography; studies by D. Cavitch (1970), R. E. Pritchard (1972), S. Spender, ed. (1973), S. Sanders (1974), and J. Meyers (1982 and 1985).

Lawrence, D. H. (1885–1930). Nottinghamshire miner's son destined for notoriety as the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). His autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913) sketches the background and the Oedipal tensions from which he escaped, a scholarship boy, first to London and then the continent. With him went Frieda von Richthofen, their early struggles recorded in his poem sequence Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). He had found his true subject, the relationship between men and women, and he wrote ‘to make English folk alter and have more sense’. The frankness of his approach led to prosecution of The Rainbow (1915), and the war years were a time of trial, though he was unfit for military service. Even so, Women in Love (1920) rivals Joyce's Ulysses as the greatest novel of the century. His subsequent wanderings took him as far as Australia and New Mexico in search of better health and the ideal society, but he found neither.

John Saunders

Lawrence, D.H. ( David Herbert) (1885–1930) English novelist, short-story writer and poet. A miner's son, in 1909 Ford Madox Ford published Lawrence's first poems in the English Review. His debut novel was The White Peacock (1911). In 1912, Lawrence published his second novel, The Trespasser, and eloped to Germany with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen). His first major novel was the semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913). The Rainbow (1915), perhaps his greatest novel, was banned as obscene. Women in Love (1921) appeared in censored form. After completing Aaron's Rod (1922), Lawrence and Frieda went into self-imposed exile. Kangaroo (1923) was inspired by his travels in Australia, and The Plumed Serpent (1926) was set in Mexico. His last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately published (1928) in Florence, but until 1960 remained available only in expurgated form in England.

Lawrence, D. H. (1885–1930). Nottinghamshire miner's son destined for notoriety as the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). His autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913) sketches the background from which he escaped, first to London and then the continent. With him went Frieda von Richthofen, their early struggles recorded in his poem sequence Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). The frankness of his approach led to prosecution of The Rainbow (1915). Women in Love (1920) rivals Joyce's Ulysses as the greatest novel of the century.