D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richard Lawrence was born 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 business. He had a passion for reading books and was very interested in the arts. His relationship to his mother was close. She was the serious-minded reader in the family, whereas his father had an easy-going attitude to life. The emotional bond to his mother grew especially strong after his brother's death in 1901. He earned a religious and moral education 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 recognised 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 she supported 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 in 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's 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.

Authorial presence in Lawrence's work

Lawrence's high textual output was always read with reference to his own biography. The 'death of the author', a term that followed in poststructuralism, had little impact on this fact. Lawrence's authorial presence is easy to pin down in his fictions and a lot of close friends and family members say that they are able to identify as the characters, appearing in his novels.

Lawrence and Modernism

Lawrence was a central figure to Modernism, which included on the one hand two decades of radical change: social values and aesthetic practices of the 19th century were left behind and on the other hand there were post-war changes in laws relating to education, women and public life and employment and housing. A great interest in myth and a fascination with social anthropology established [what??]. According to Ezra Pound it was the artist's task to "make it new" . Literary modernism aimed at the reformation of poetry and the novel. In his writing Lawrence showed himself as the ablest commentator on the successes and failures of modern literature. During this time he made friends with Pound, who helped his poetry into print in periodicals and other friendships included E.M. Forster and people associated with the Bloomsbury Group. He also met the poet and novelist Aldous Huxley and the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russel. During the First World War he did not have to participate, as he was physically unfit. Nevertheless it was a tense period for him, his marriage and it influenced his writing. He reflects on his personal war trauma in one chapter of his novel Kangaroo (1923). His dissatisfaction with the situation made him think about an alternative life-style and he introduced his idea of a small island community of like-minded people, which in the end was never realised. In December 1915 the Lawrences moved to Cornwall. He liked the rural life and continued working on Women in Love, poems and short-stories, until in 1917 they were forced by military authorities to leave, being accused of spying and signalling to German submarines. He flew for one year to Mountain Cotton, Derbyshire, where he wrote his short-story The Wintry Peacock and went then in 1919 to Italy. During his work on Aaron's Rod and Mr. Noon an expurgated version of Women in Love was published in America in 1920. Lawrence just decided for a voluntary exile. He visited Ceylon, then moved to Australia, a country that inspired him to write Kangaroo.

America and return to Europe

In 1922 he got an invitation from Mabel Dodge Luhan to come to America and spend some time in Taos, Mexico, and so he did. In America he felt he could consolidate a large audience and he enjoyed his celebrity status. He rewrote literary critical philosophy: Studies in Classic American Literature. He got to know some Taos artists,to whose work he looked up to, as he himself liked to paint. 1923 he started writing The Plumed Serpent and The Boy in the Bush, a collaborative work with Mollie Skinner. In late 1923 he returned to Europe: Hampstead, Paris, different places in Germany, London and instead of returning to his meanwhile fixed abode Taos, he travelled across Mexico in 1924. There he found his inspiration for writing The Woman who Rode Away and other short-stories. He also finished The Plumed Serpent, St. Mawr and The Princess. He got seriously ill in 1925 and suffered from tuberculosis. He read among others Joyce's works and expressed his dislike of self-conscious, self-reflexive writing. His last five years he spent in Northern Italy, Florence. In the late 1920s he wanted to exhibit his paintings, but they were seized for obscenity. His last novel Lady Chatterley's Lover developed his thought on 'phallic consciousness'. Due to the strict censorship an authorised abridged version of this novel was published in 1932, two years after his death in Vence, on 2 March 1930. His ashes were delivered to his wife in Taos.

Sources:

Becket, Fiona. The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Fernihough, Anne. The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Ruth Williams, Linda. D.H. Lawrence. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1997.