D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence an English novelist, poet, essayist and painter (1885-1930), one of the most original and controversial writers of the twentieth century. He wrote with passionate intensity about love, instinct, class and industrial society, and his novels, among them Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, helped free the English novel from Victorian convention.

Life and Background

David Herbert Lawrence was born at Eastwood, in the Nottinghamshire coal country, on 11 September 1885. His father was a coal miner and his mother a former schoolteacher, and the tension between them, and the wider conflict of class and aspiration, became one of the deepest themes of his fiction.

He was a delicate and studious boy and won a scholarship, training as a teacher and working briefly in a school near London. He began writing early and published his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1911. In 1912 he met Frieda Weekley, the German-born wife of a professor, and eloped with her to the continent, a scandal that estranged him from much of English society.

They married after her divorce and lived a wandering life in Italy, Germany, France, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico. Poor health, caused largely by tuberculosis, shadowed his later years, and his opposition to the First World War and his German wife's origins made him an object of suspicion in wartime Britain. He died in the south of France on 2 March 1930.

Major Novels

Sons and Lovers, published in 1913, is a partly autobiographical novel of a miner's family and a young man's struggle to free himself from his mother's possessive love. It combines realistic social detail with a new psychological depth and is often ranked among the finest English novels of its period.

The Rainbow of 1915 traces three generations of a farming family and their encounters with love, education and industry, and its treatment of passion caused it to be prosecuted for obscenity and withdrawn. Women in Love, its sequel, published in 1920, carries the same characters into a searching examination of love, will and the modern condition, and is widely regarded as his masterpiece.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in the late 1920s, describes the love of a gamekeeper and an aristocratic woman and mingles sexual candour with a critique of industrial England. Banned in Britain for decades, it became the subject of a celebrated obscenity trial in 1960, which cleared the way for its publication and became a landmark in the history of literary freedom.

Poetry, Stories and Travel Writing

Lawrence was a prolific poet, and his verse, collected in volumes such as Look! We Have Come Through!, Birds, Beasts and Flowers and Pansies, is direct, sensuous and often raw. He wrote about animals, flowers and places with vivid attention and about love and death without sentimentality, and he revised and reissued his poems throughout his life.

His short stories, including The Prussian Officer, The Rocking-Horse Winner and The Woman Who Rode Away, are among the best of the century. They range from studies of working-class life to fables of obsession, sexuality and the uncanny, and they show his gift for capturing a scene and a mood in a few strokes.

He also wrote travel books and essays, among them Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Mornings in Mexico and Studies in Classic American Literature. These are not guidebooks but meditations on place, people and the spirit of a country, and the last of them helped shape a new and provocative reading of American writing.

Themes and Beliefs

Lawrence's great subject is the wholeness of life, the body and the instincts against the mechanical and the abstract. He believed that industrial civilisation had cut human beings off from nature, from one another and from their own blood, and that modern people had been trained to live too much in the mind. Against this he set the values of spontaneity, touch and vital connection.

He wrote about love and sexuality as the central drama of human life and treated the relations of men and women as a field of both fulfilment and struggle. He was interested in power and tenderness together, in the balance of two wills, and he rejected merely romantic or merely physical accounts of desire.

Politically he was idiosyncratic and often disturbing. He was hostile to industrialism and to mass society, and in some late works he speculated about leaders and about a renewal of human community in terms that critics have found troubling. His beliefs were deeply personal rather than systematic, and they are inseparable from the fiction in which he embodied them.

Influence and Legacy

Lawrence enlarged the subject matter of the English novel by treating sex, class and the unconscious with a seriousness and physical immediacy that had previously been avoided. His depictions of the miner's world and of the relations between men and women influenced later writers, and his insistence on feeling as a source of knowledge anticipated enduring concerns in modern literature.

The trial over Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 became a defining moment in the liberalisation of British publishing and censorship, and the book's acquittal allowed far greater freedom for serious writers to treat sexual themes. Lawrence thus had an influence that extended well beyond his own pages.

His reputation has grown and changed with the decades. He has been read as a prophet of the body, as an opponent of industrial modernity and as a difficult and often contradictory artist, and the large body of his work in many genres now stands as one of the most personal achievements in twentieth-century letters. He died at the age of forty-four, still at the height of his powers.

See also

• Sons and Lovers
• Women in Love
• Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Modernist literature