Lawrence, D. H.
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
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Lawrence, D. H.