D. H. Lawrence

Any serious D. H. Lawrence biography begins in Eastwood, a mining town in Nottinghamshire, where David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885 ^[1]. His father, Arthur Lawrence, worked underground at the Brinsley colliery and was barely literate. His mother, Lydia Beardsall, had been a schoolteacher before her marriage and never stopped regarding the pits, and to some degree her husband, as beneath her. The friction between them, the collier's physical world set against the mother's ambitions for refinement, gave Lawrence the central tension of his early fiction ^[2].

Lawrence was the fourth of five children and a sickly boy, prone to the chest complaints that would eventually kill him. Lydia poured her hopes into her sons, and in 1898 David became the first boy from Eastwood to win a county scholarship to Nottingham High School ^[2]. He left at sixteen, worked briefly as a clerk at a surgical appliance factory in Nottingham, then suffered a severe bout of pneumonia that ended his clerking. He turned instead to teaching, first as a pupil-teacher in Eastwood and nearby Ilkeston, and from 1906 as a student at University College, Nottingham, where he earned a teaching certificate in 1908 ^[1].

During these years he formed an intense friendship with Jessie Chambers, a farmer's daughter from the Haggs Farm near Eastwood. She encouraged his reading and his first attempts at writing, and in 1909 she sent some of his poems to Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), editor of the English Review. Hueffer published them, declared the young schoolmaster a genius, and opened the door to literary London ^[2].

From 1908 to 1911 Lawrence taught at Davidson Road School in Croydon, south of London, writing in the evenings. His first novel, The White Peacock, appeared in January 1911, just weeks after the death of his mother from cancer, a loss that devastated him ^[2]. A second novel, The Trespasser, followed in 1912. That year another attack of pneumonia forced him to give up teaching for good, and he committed himself entirely to writing, a precarious decision for a miner's son with no private income ^[1].

In March 1912 he called on Ernest Weekley, a former professor of his at Nottingham, and met Weekley's wife, Frieda von Richthofen, a German aristocrat six years his senior and the mother of three children. Within weeks the two had left England together for Germany and Italy. Frieda's divorce came through in 1914, and she and Lawrence married in London that July ^[3]. The elopement supplied him with the partner, the turbulence, and much of the material that ran through the rest of his work.

Sons and Lovers, published in 1913, made his reputation. The novel reworked his Eastwood childhood, the mining household, the possessive mother, the son torn between her and the young women in his life, into fiction of unusual psychological candor ^[1]. Critics have long read it alongside early Freudian ideas about family attachment, though Lawrence drew primarily on his own history rather than on theory ^[4].

Anyone asking who was D. H. Lawrence at the height of his powers should look to the pair of novels he wrote during the First World War. The Rainbow (1915) followed three generations of the Brangwen family in the English Midlands, tracing how industrialism and changing ideas of marriage transformed rural life. Within weeks of publication it was prosecuted for obscenity, and a London magistrate ordered unsold copies destroyed ^[1]. Its sequel, Women in Love, completed in 1916, could not find a British publisher until 1921, appearing first in a private New York edition in 1920. Many scholars now regard it as his finest novel ^[2].

Among D. H. Lawrence achievements the fiction is only part of the record. He was a prolific poet whose free verse collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) contains some of the most admired animal poems in English, including Snake, written at Taormina in Sicily ^[5]. He wrote plays rooted in colliery life, such as The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, travel books including Sea and Sardinia (1921) and Mornings in Mexico (1927), and a provocative critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), which helped establish the serious reading of Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman ^[5].

His last major novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was printed privately in Florence in 1928 because no British or American house would touch its explicit language and its story of an affair between an aristocrat's wife and her gamekeeper. The unexpurgated text remained banned in Britain for more than thirty years. When Penguin Books issued it in 1960, the firm was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act and acquitted after a celebrated Old Bailey trial, a verdict widely seen as a turning point for literary freedom in Britain ^[6].

Lawrence's marriage to Frieda was famously stormy and famously durable. The couple quarreled violently and publicly, yet remained together until his death, and Frieda's vitality left traces in many of his heroines ^[3]. They had no children, though Frieda's separation from her own three children caused her lasting grief in the early years.

The war years were bitter. Lawrence's opposition to the war, his tubercular frailty (he was repeatedly rejected for service), and Frieda's German origins, she was a cousin of the fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen, made the couple objects of suspicion. While living at Zennor in Cornwall in 1917 they were accused of signalling to German submarines and expelled from the county under wartime regulations, an episode Lawrence recounted with fury in his novel Kangaroo ^[2].

He sustained intense, often combustible friendships with writers and patrons including Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, Aldous Huxley, and Lady Ottoline Morrell, several of whom appeared, thinly disguised and not always flatteringly, in his fiction ^[3]. In his last years he also took up painting; a 1929 London exhibition of his canvases was raided by police, who removed thirteen pictures deemed indecent ^[1].

After the war Lawrence left England in 1919 and returned only for brief visits. He called his wanderings a savage pilgrimage. The route ran through Italy and Sicily, then Ceylon and Australia in 1922, where he wrote Kangaroo in about six weeks, and on to the United States ^[1]. The arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan drew the Lawrences to Taos, New Mexico, and in 1924 gave Frieda the Kiowa Ranch on Lobo Mountain, the only home the couple ever owned. Lawrence later said New Mexico changed him more than any other place ^[7].

From the ranch the Lawrences traveled into Mexico, where he gathered material for The Plumed Serpent (1926), his novel of a revived Aztec religion. In Oaxaca in early 1925 he nearly died of malaria and typhoid, and a doctor in Mexico City diagnosed the tuberculosis he had long refused to name ^[7]. Barred by his health from returning to America, he settled again in Italy, at the Villa Mirenda near Florence, where he wrote the three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover between 1926 and 1928 ^[2].

His final years were a race against his failing lungs. He kept writing: poems collected in Pansies (1929), the essay A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Apocalypse, a meditation on the Book of Revelation published after his death. In February 1930 he entered a sanatorium at Vence in the south of France, discharged himself after a month, and died in a rented villa there on March 2, 1930, at the age of 44 ^[1]. In 1935 his remains were exhumed and cremated, and the ashes were carried to a small memorial chapel at the Kiowa Ranch in New Mexico ^[7].

At his death Lawrence's reputation was clouded. Obituarists remembered the banned books and the scandals as much as the art, and E. M. Forster's description of him as the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation was a minority view. The revaluation came after the Second World War, driven above all by the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis, whose 1955 study D. H. Lawrence: Novelist placed him in the great tradition of the English novel alongside Austen, Eliot, and Conrad ^[8].

The 1960 Penguin trial made Lady Chatterley's Lover a bestseller and made Lawrence a symbol of the permissive turn in British culture. Two million copies sold within a year of the acquittal ^[6]. Later decades brought sharper criticism: Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) attacked his portrayal of women and dented his standing, and arguments about his views on sex, power, and race continue. Yet the work has kept its readers, and Cambridge University Press spent decades issuing scholarly editions of his novels, letters, and poems ^[2].

Basic D. H. Lawrence facts are now part of the literary landscape: the miner's son who became one of the most original English writers of his century, author of roughly a dozen novels, some 800 poems, plays, criticism, and travel writing in a working life of barely twenty years. The University of Nottingham holds a major research collection of his manuscripts and letters, his Eastwood birthplace is a museum, and Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love remain fixtures of the modern canon ^[9].