Background

D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England on September 11, 1885, the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a little-educated coal miner, and Lydia Beardsall, a woman of middle-class origins who fought with her husband and his limited way of life so that the children might escape it or, as Lawrence once put it, "rise in the world." Their quarrel and estrangement, and the consequent damage to the children, became the subject of perhaps his most famous novel, Sons and Lovers (1913).

Education

Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School (now renamed Greasley Beauvale D. H. Lawrence Primary School in his honour) from 1891 until 1898. He became the first local pupil to win a county council scholarship to Nottingham High School in nearby Nottingham. He left in 1901 to earn a living as a clerk in a factory, but within several months his health failed.

In the years 1902 to 1906 Lawrence served as a pupil-teacher at the British School, Eastwood. He went on to become a full-time student and received a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham (then an external college of University of London), in 1908. During these early years, he was working on his first poems, some short stories, and a draft of a novel, Laetitia, which was eventually to become The White Peacock. At the end of 1907, he won a short story competition in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, the first time that he had gained any wider recognition for his literary talents.

Career

In 1908 Lawrence went to teach at Davidson Road School in Croydon until 1912 when his health failed. The great friend of his youth, Jessie Chambers, who was the real-life counterpart of Miriam in Sons and Lovers, had sent some of his work to the English Review. The editor, Ford Madox Ford, hailed him at once as a find, and Lawrence began his writing career.

Lawrence's constant struggle for a right relationship with women came to a climax in his encounter, liaison, and marriage with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. They had met in 1912 and were married in 1914; their evolving relationship is reflected in all his work after Sons and Lovers. The fulfillment it meant to him can be seen most directly and poignantly in the volume of poems Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). Like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow (1915) and Women In Love (1920) are set in England and reflect Lawrence's deep concern with the male-female relationship. The Lawrences lived in many parts of the world-particularly, as place affected his work, in Italy, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico.

During World War I Lawrence and his wife were trapped in England and living in poverty and had to endure growing suspicion and hostility from their Cornwall rural neighbours on account of Lawrence’s pacifism and Frieda’s German origins. They were expelled from the county in 1917 on suspicion of signaling to German submarines and spent the rest of the war in London and Derbyshire. Though threatened with military conscription, Lawrence wrote some of his finest work during the war.

Embittered by the censorship of his work and the suspicion regarding his German-born wife during the war, Lawrence sought a propitious place where his friends and he might form a colony based on individuality and talent rather than possessions. This he never realized for more than brief periods. There were quarrels and desertions, and his precarious health was a factor in the constant moves. After World War I Lawrence and his wife went to Italy (1919), and he never again lived in England.

In 1921 the Lawrences decided to leave Europe and go to the United States, but eastward, via Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Australia. Finally reaching Taos, New Mexico, where he settled for a time, Lawrence visited Mexico in 1923. Lawrence returned to Italy in 1925, and four years later moved to the south of France.

Lawrence's work from the war onward traces his search. His work's rhythm he described as the exploring of situations in his fiction (and, one might add, his poetry) and then the abstracting and consolidating of his thought in essays, some of book-length, like Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), and, at the very end, Apocalypse (1931). For the Australian phase there is the novel Kangaroo (1923); for New Mexico, various short stories, poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the novelette St. Mawr (1925), and essays, particularly those on the Indian dances; for Mexico, the novel The Plumed Serpent (1926) and the sketches titled Mornings in Mexico (1927); for the Mediterranean area with its pagan traditions, the novels The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron's Rod (1922) and the novelettes Sun (1928) and The Man Who Died (1931). Toward the last his imagination returned to his English origins for the scene and characters of his most notorious and controversial novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The novelette The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) reflects the same concern.

All through his career Lawrence's boldness in treating the sexual side of his characters' relationships had aroused the censorious. For example, The Rainbow was originally withdrawn and destroyed by the publisher after a complaint. But in Lady Chatterley's Lover, his last full-length novel, Lawrence went much further. The book was banned in England, and this was followed by the seizure of the manuscript of his poems Pansies and the closing of an exhibition of his paintings.

Lawrence used all of the literary forms successfully, except perhaps for drama (there are a few early plays not much read or produced and David, 1926, from his latter years in the United States). He wrote strikingly good short stories all through his career. Early ones are "Odour of Chrysanthemums," "Daughters of the Vicar," "Love among the Haystacks," "The Prussian Officer," "Tickets, Please," and "The Horse-dealer's Daughter." Others, of middle and late period, are "The Border Line," "The Woman Who Rode Away," "Glad Ghosts," "The Rocking Horse Winner," "Two Blue Birds," "The Man Who Loved Islands," and "Things." He was a master of the short novel (novelette) form in The Fox, The Ladybird, The Captain's Doll (all 1923), Sun, The Virgin and the Gipsy, and The Man Who Died, this last being an extension of Christ's life into a resurrection and fulfillment in this world that lends itself to philosophically existential interpretations.

Lawrence's poetry ranges from early rhymed poems in Love Poems and Others (1913) and Amores (1925), through the freer forms of Look! We Have Come Through! and the highly experimental and free forms of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, through the deliberately doggerel satire of much of Pansies (1929) and Nettles (1930), to the less colloquial and at times classical diction and rhythm of Last Poems (1932), gathered from his manuscripts and published posthumously.

In criticism Lawrence achieved a book that is still regarded as one containing important, challenging insights, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and a number of essays on the novel that have provided themes for later critics, particularly his distinction between an author's conscious intentions and what the novel may actually be saying. Among "travel" books his Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Places (1932) are of interest. The short journalistic pieces collected in his Assorted Articles (1930) are witty and challenging. Some of his essays did not appear in book form until the appearance of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (1936), edited by Edward McDonald, who also issued two bibliographies of Lawrence's work during the author's life-time.

Achievements

• Lawrence is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century and valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature. The author published many novels and poetry volumes during his lifetime, including Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, but is best known for his infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover. Garnering fame for his novels and short stories early on in his career, Lawrence later received acclaim for his personal letters, in which he detailed a range of emotions, from exhilaration to depression to prophetic brooding.

Works

More photos

• book

  • New Eve and Old Adam

    (The story is largely autobiographical, telling the simple...)

    1934
  • Odour of Chrysanthemums

    ("Odour of Chrysanthemums" is the story of Elizabeth, a yo...)

    1911
  • Love Among the Haystacks

    (In this story, Lawrence returns to the scenes of his youn...)

    1929
  • The Virgin and the Gypsy

    (In a claustrophobic household, oppressed by her blind, to...)

    1930
  • Women in Love

    (As a sequel to The Rainbow, the novel develops experiment...)

    1920
  • Kangaroo

    (Kangaroo is an account of a visit to New South Wales by a...)

    1923
  • The Rainbow

    (The Rainbow follows three generations of the Brangwen fam...)

    1915
  • The Blind Man

    ("The Blind Man" is a delicate study of a loving relations...)

  • The Fox

    (Set during the First World War, "The Fox" is the story of...)

    1923
  • Daughters of the Vicar

    (This edition of Daughters of the Vicar includes a Table o...)

  • Lady Chatterley's Lover

    (Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence's last novel is one of t...)

    1928
  • The Horse-Dealer's Daughter

    (D.H. Lawrence's 'The Horse Dealer's Daughter' could be de...)

    1922
  • The Lost Girl 1920
  • The Mortal Coil
  • The Shades of Spring
  • Sons and Lovers 1913
  • Goose Fair
  • Twilight in Italy 1916
  • Her Turn 1912

Religion

Religiously and ethically he can be described as a vitalist, finding a source and a guide - in a sense, God - in the "life force" itself as it was manifested in nature, untampered with by "mental attitudes." He was concerned with how this force might be restored to a proper balance in human behavior.

Politics

Critic Terry Eagleton situates Lawrence on the radical right wing of politics, as hostile to democracy, liberalism, socialism, and egalitarianism, though never formally embracing fascism, as he died before it reached its zenith.

Views

The problems Lawrence dealt with in his works are increasingly urgent and he explored them with original force, commitment, and style that appeal especially to the young. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Lawrence believed that his generation was witnessing the final disintegration of Western culture, a culture that for centuries had wrongly emphasized mind and spirit at the expense of instinctual, natural life. As a result, Western civilization had become a monstrous machine that, out of control, was destroying itself.

Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. When World War I broke out, he felt that it was then more important to find the grounds of faith in life itself and the means to a new integration of the individual and society. To this he added the question of the nature of a relationship between man and man that would have the same higher significance as that between man and woman.

Lawrence held seemingly contradictory views on feminism. The evidence of his written works, particularly his earlier novels, indicates an overwhelming commitment to representing women as strong, independent and complex; as noted above he produced major works in which young, self-directing female characters were central. In his youth he supported extending the vote to women, and once wrote, "All women in their natures are like giantesses. They will break through everything and go on with their own lives." However, a number of feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have criticised, indeed ridiculed Lawrence’s sexual politics, Millett claiming that he uses his female characters as mouthpieces to promote his creed of male supremacy, and that his story The Woman Who Rode Away showed Lawrence as a pornographic sadist with its portrayal of "human sacrifice performed upon the woman to the greater glory and potency of the male."

Quotations: "I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter."

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery its a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime. I could curse for hours and hours — God help me."

"It's the man who dares to take, who is independent, not he who gives."

"The dead don't die. They look on and help."

"Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."

"A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it."

"We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

"For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack."

"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself."

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

Personality

Reviled as a crude and pornographic writer for much of the latter part of his life, Lawrence is now widely considered - alongside James Joyce and Virginia Woolf - as one of the great modernist English-language writers. His linguistic precision, mastery of a wide range of subject matters and genres, psychological complexity and exploration of female sexuality distinguish him as one of the most refined and revolutionary English writers of the early 20th century. Lawrence himself considered his writings an attempt to challenge and expose what he saw as the constrictive and oppressive cultural norms of modern Western culture.

Lawrence was a rebellious and profoundly polemical writer with radical views, who regarded sex, the primitive subconscious, and nature as cures to what he considered the evils of modern industrialized society. Besides his troubles with the censors, Lawrence was persecuted as well during World War I, for the supposed pro-German sympathies of his wife, Frieda. As a consequence, the Lawrences left England and traveled restlessly to Italy, Germany, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the French Riviera, Mexico and the United States, unsuccessfully searching for a new homeland. In Taos, New Mexico, he became the center of a group of female admirers who considered themselves his disciples, and whose quarrels for his attention became a literary legend.

Physical Characteristics: D. H. Lawrence was very sickly at birth and his parents feared he would never reach adulthood. He was plagued by illnesses his entire life.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Isn’t it remarkable how everyone who knew Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he’s had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!" - Aldous Huxley
  
  "Is there no name later than Conrad's to be included in the Great Tradition? There is, I am convinced, one: D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, in the English language, was the great genius of our time (I mean the age, or climatic phase, following Conrad's)." - F. R. Leavis
  
  "He had a mystical philosophy of "blood" which I disliked. "There is," he said, "another seat of consciousness than the brain and nerves. There is a blood consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness. One lives, knows and has one's being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life belonging to the darkness. When I take a woman, then the blood percept is supreme. My blood knowing is overwhelming. We should realize that we have a blood being, a blood consciousness, a blood soul complete and apart from a mental and nerve consciousness." This seemed to me frankly rubbish, and I rejected it vehemently, though I did not then know that it led straight to Auschwitz." - Bertrand Russell
  
  "It seems to us now that his system, for all its fervour, was largely negative, a mere assertion of his denial of the system of his upbringing. His God, for instance, must be the exact opposite of the 'gentle Jesus' of his childhood. There must be nothing at all gentle about the "dark" force to which the dark independent outlaws of his dreams would owe a sort of reverence. The community to which Lawrence looked forward, the leaders and the led, is established. Men act, instead of wasting their energies in abstract thought. And yet, if Lawrence had seen it, he would have been appalled. Fascism finally succeeded, at least temporarily, in making the synthesis that eluded Lawrence." - Rex Warner
  
  "Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping." - Ed Zern

Interests

• painting

• Writers

  Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Lev Shestov, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, Arthur Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell

Connections

Lawrence fell in love and eloped with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), the aristocratic German wife of a professor at Nottingham. The couple went first to Germany and then to Italy, where Lawrence completed Sons and Lovers. They were married in England in 1914 after Frieda’s divorce.

Father:

Arthur John Lawrence

Mother:

Lydia Beardsall

Wife:

Frieda Lawrence

Frieda Lawrence (August 11, 1879 – August 11, 1956), was a German literary figure mainly known for her marriage to the British novelist D. H. Lawrence. She was a distant relation of Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron".

Friend:

Jessie Chambers

Jessie Chambers was one of the most influential, and important, persons in D.H.Lawrence’s life. She was certainly his first real love, and perhaps his only true love, notwithstanding his later, scandalous, and enduring, love for Frieda.

Friend:

John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry (6 August 1889 – 12 March 1957) was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband, for his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and for his friendship (and brief affair) with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.

Friend:

Aldous Huxley

References

• D.H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War Delves into the circumstances of Lawrence's life during the First World War, bringing to light the impact of the growing horror of the war on Lawrence's physical and emotional health and on the writing of Women in Love.
  1979
• D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage A personal look at a controversial literary figure examines his views on women, marriage, and sexuality, challenging current beliefs about his racism, adultery, repressed homosexuality, and his odd but enduring marriage to Frieda.
  1994
• D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922 This second volume of the acclaimed Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence covers the years 1912-22, the period in which he forged his reputation as one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century.
  2011
• D.H. Lawrence: A Biography Meyers' fresh insights into Lawrence's life illuminate Lawrence's working-class childhood, his tempestuous marriage, and his death in France after the scandalous publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, revealing Lawrence's complex method of intermingling autobiography and fiction.
  2002
• The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence This biography of Lawrence is unlike any other in its focus on the essential character of the artist and in its synthesis of the facts of his life and thought.
  1986
• Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen Dashingly told and meticulously researched, this double biography of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen is the first to draw fully on Frieda’s unpublished letters and on interviews with people who knew her well. It explores their collision with an industrial world they hated and chronicles the stormy relationship between husband and wife.
  2002