D. H. Lawrence

An intense life

1885-1930

The young Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire.

He was the fourth of five children of a miner and an educated mother.

Education

Educated in local schools and then attended Nottingham University College where he trained as a teacher.

Taught school in Croydon from 1908.

His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911,shortly after th death of his mother to whom he’d been very close.

Other works

More novels soon followed

The Trespasser 1912

The Rainbow 1920

The Lost Girl 1920

The Boy in the Bush 1922

The Captain’s Doll 1923

The Virgin and the Gypsy 1930

Poems

Mostly imagistic and in free verse about the individual inner nature of plants and animals.“Fish”“Snake”“Mountain Lion”“Bavarian Gentians”Look! We Have Come Through (1917)

Short Stories

“The Prussian Officer”

“The Woman Who Rode Away”

“The Fox”

“The Rocking-Horse Winner”

“The Man Who Loved Islands”

“The Odour of Chrysanthemums”

Major Novels

Women in Love

Sons and Lovers

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Kangaroo

The Plumed Serpent

Criticism and Essays

Topics included

Travel writing

American literature

Psychoanalysis

The Unconscious

History and democracy

Personal LifeIn 1912 Lawrence met and ran off with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, the German wife of a Nottingham professor. Frieda had three children, yet left them and her husband to “elope” with Lawrence.

A passionate relationship

The Lawrences returned to England in 1914

They traveled with a very literary “set” including Huxley, Katherine Mansfield and her husband, and the Bloomsbury folks

Struggles

Anti-German feeling during the war

Censorship

Ill health—tuberculosis

The search for a “right place”

Travel included Sicily, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico, New Zealand, Tahiti,Italy,Australia, and France

An Artists’ Colony in Taos

Themes and Philosophy

Deeply interested in Freudian and Jungian psychology, Lawrence is also influenced by primitive religions and nature mysticism.

Sex and sexual freedom as the cure for what ails modern civilization.

Nietzschean idea of the superman and rebellion.

Critical opinions of Lawrence

Tends to go in and out of fashionEnjoys a great revival in the 1960s and 1970sIs hard to categorize because of the volume and varietyVaries in quality with stories most highly praisedSuffers criticism from didactic slant

Last years

Becomes an almost guru to a group of women who call him “Lorenzo” and vie for his attention

Tuberculosis worsens, sending he and Frieda in search of easier climates

Dies in Vence in the South of France in 1930 at age 44.

Lawrence’s Legacy “A marvellous writer. He forged his own language.”' Claire Tomalin, `Lawrence urged men and women to live, to honour the quick of themselves, to glory in the exhilarating terror of this brief life.' Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times

Frieda, on her husband

“What he had seen and felt and known he gave in his writing to his fellow men, the splendour of living, the hope of more and more life … a heroic and immeasureable gift.”