D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richard Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood Nottinghamshire and died on 2 March 1930 in Vence. He was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic, painter and according to E.M Forster the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation. His life was adventurous. He travelled the world and lived and wrote in very different locations across four continents. His work explores issues of sexuality and gender, construction of identity and the development of social and political themes. He had an international success that stretched far beyond the Anglophone world.

Early life

D.H. Lawrence was born into a working-class family. His father was a miner and his mother a middle-class woman that married under her class. The young Lawrence went to Nottingham High School and did not like other young men finish school with 14 years and start to work in local coal industries in Eastwood. Hungry for knowledge, he continued going to school and qualified in the British school in Eastwood as a school-teacher (1906). Before becoming a teacher he became a short-time clerk in a medical supplies buisness. He had a passion for reading books and was very interested in arts. His relationship to his mother was therefore closer. She was the serious-minded reader in the family, whereas his father had an easy-going attitude to life. The emotional band to his mother grew especially strong after his brother's death in 1901. A religious and moral education he earned in the large congregationalist community of Eastwood, where his mother's values of education, self-improvement and self-discipline were reinforced. By the time of his mother's death he recognized his strong interest in writing, which his father rejected.

Relationships and Marriage

Lawrence's first girlfriend Jessie Chambers discovered his potential in writing poems and sent some to the English Review in 1909. Hueffer, editor and central person to the development of modernism, read them and was convinced. He was willing to support Lawrence and published these poems. Jessie Chambers was responsible for his first public attention and started thereby his literary career. Nevertheless they split up and Lawrence fell in love with Louise Burrows, with whom he studied, in 1910. As Lawrence she was a teacher and a supporter of the Suffrage Movement. They got engaged but did never marry. Lawrence, still working as a teacher, decided in 1912 to write full-time due to illness. The first novel he wrote was The White Peacock, followed by The Trespasser and then 1913 appeared Sons and Lovers , which is said to be influenced by Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Love poems and others. In the same year he met the love of his life Frieda Weekley, the wife of Lawrence German tutor. She got divorced from her husband and left her children to start a new life with Lawrence in England. There they got married in July 1914 in Kensington, a few days before the First World War broke out. Lawrence worked productively on further novels. The Rainbow and Women in Love offered a wider range of characters, new relationships, art, sexuality, modern morbidity and unfixed identities. In England these novels were accused of offending conventional morality.