D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, a coal-mining town on the border of the Erewash Valley. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, was a barely literate coal miner; his mother, Lydia Beardsall, was a former schoolteacher of slightly higher social class who was bitterly unhappy in her marriage and poured her frustrated ambitions into her sons, particularly David Herbert. The class tension between his parents — the rough physicality of the father, the aspirational gentility of the mother — is the primal drama of Lawrence’s fiction, explored most directly in Sons and Lovers.

Life and Career

Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottingham High School, worked briefly as a clerk, and then trained as a schoolteacher at Nottingham University College, qualifying in 1908. He taught at an elementary school in Croydon, south London, while writing his first novels. The White Peacock (1911) was published when he was twenty-five; Sons and Lovers (1913), his third novel and first masterpiece, drew heavily on his childhood and his intense, possessive relationship with his mother, who had died of cancer in 1910.

In 1912, Lawrence eloped with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley — a German aristocrat, the wife of one of his former professors, and the mother of three children — setting off one of the great love affairs in literary history. They married in 1914 and remained together, stormily, until his death. Frieda was Lawrence’s muse, adversary, and collaborator; her influence pervades all his mature work.

The war years were catastrophic. The Rainbow (1915) was prosecuted for obscenity and suppressed — all copies were ordered destroyed — an event that embittered Lawrence against England for life. He and Frieda were harassed by the authorities (she was German, he was a known pacifist), and they were expelled from Cornwall in 1917 under suspicion of espionage.

After the war, the Lawrences embarked on what he called his “savage pilgrimage” — a restless wandering that took them to Italy, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico, and back to Europe. Lawrence wrote prolifically throughout: novels (Women in Love, 1920; Aaron’s Rod, 1922; Kangaroo, 1923; The Plumed Serpent, 1926; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928), stories, poems, travel books, essays, and paintings. His health, never robust, deteriorated through the 1920s — tuberculosis, which he refused for years to acknowledge.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was printed privately in Florence because no commercial publisher would touch it. The unexpurgated text was not legally published in England until 1960, when Penguin Books won the landmark obscenity trial that became one of the defining moments of twentieth-century publishing history.

Lawrence died of tuberculosis on 2 March 1930 in Vence, in the south of France. He was forty-four.

Major Works and Themes

Lawrence’s great subject is the conflict between the mechanical, cerebral, death-dealing forces of modern industrial civilisation and the dark, instinctual, erotic energies of the body. His novels attempt to find a language for sexual and emotional experience that Western culture had repressed — a project that made him a scandalous figure in his lifetime and a liberating one afterward.

Sons and Lovers (1913) is the essential autobiographical novel: Paul Morel’s struggle to free himself from his mother’s love and to form authentic relationships with women is drawn directly from Lawrence’s own experience. It is one of the finest examples of the bildungsroman in English.

The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), originally conceived as a single novel, trace three generations of the Brangwen family and constitute Lawrence’s most ambitious work. The Rainbow moves from the agricultural rhythms of the old Brangwen farm to the industrial and educational modernity of Ursula’s generation; Women in Love carries the story into the post-war wasteland, exploring two couples’ attempts to find authentic connection in a dying civilisation. Women in Love is Lawrence’s masterpiece — a novel of extraordinary psychological intensity, visionary passages, and formal daring.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) is Lawrence’s most notorious novel: Constance Chatterley’s affair with the gamekeeper Mellors, told with an explicitness of sexual language that was unprecedented in English fiction. Beneath the scandal, it is a serious novel about class, vitality, and the deadening effects of industrial capitalism on the body and the spirit.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Lawrence’s reputation has fluctuated more than most major writers’. In his lifetime he was famous, controversial, and widely banned. After his death, F.R. Leavis championed him as the greatest English novelist of the century, placing him in “the great tradition” alongside Austen, Eliot, James, and Conrad. The feminist critique of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) attacked Lawrence’s treatment of women and male sexuality, and his critical stock fell.

More recent assessments have restored a balanced view: Lawrence was a writer of genuine visionary power, extraordinary descriptive gifts, and deep psychological insight, who was also capable of repetitiveness, hectoring, and a troubling mysticism of blood and instinct. His best work — Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, the finest short stories (“Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” “The Woman Who Rode Away”) — is indisputably great.

Key Works

• The White Peacock (1911)
• Sons and Lovers (1913)
• The Rainbow (1915)
• Women in Love (1920)
• Aaron’s Rod (1922)
• Kangaroo (1923)
• The Plumed Serpent (1926)
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
• Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923, poetry)

Collecting Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence is a major collecting name, and his bibliography is complicated by the suppression, private printing, and piracy of several key works.

The Rainbow (1915, Methuen, London) is among the rarest first editions of any major twentieth-century English novel. After the obscenity prosecution, the magistrate ordered all copies destroyed; Methuen reportedly pulped 1,011 copies. The number of surviving first editions is unknown but small — perhaps a few hundred. Fine copies bring $5,000–$20,000. Any copy of the first edition is significant.

Sons and Lovers (1913, Duckworth, London) is the most accessible of the major first editions. Published in blue cloth, first editions bring $1,000–$5,000 depending on condition.

Women in Love (1920) presents a textual complexity: the first edition was published in the United States by Thomas Seltzer (New York, 1920) before the English edition (Martin Secker, 1921) because no English publisher would take it. The Seltzer edition, in blue cloth with the dust jacket, is the true first edition and brings $2,000–$8,000 in fine condition.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was first published by Tipografia Giuntina in Florence, in an edition of 1,000 copies, numbered and signed by Lawrence. This Florence first edition is the great Lawrence collectible: fine copies bring $5,000–$20,000. Pirated editions proliferated immediately, and the collecting landscape is complex. The Penguin “trial edition” (1960) — the edition at the centre of the obscenity trial — is collected in its own right, particularly with the original cover price of 3s.6d.

Lawrence’s autograph material is available but expensive. He was a vigorous correspondent, and his letters (over 5,000 survive) are among the finest in the language. Letters surface at auction at $1,000–$10,000 depending on content. His manuscripts are held principally by the University of Nottingham, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.