D. H. Lawrence Life Works Quotation Partial List Of Works

The son of an ex-teacher and a coal miner, Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom. His mixture of working and middle class parents and their often volatile relationship had a great impact on the literature of this English writer. In 1902 he contracted pneumonia and his career as a factory clerk, which had barely started, came to an end. He began training as a teacher first teaching the sons of miners in his home town and then returning to education to receive a teaching certificate from University College Nottingham in 1908.

While working as a teacher in Croydon some of his poetry came to the attention of Ford Maddox HuefferFord Madox Ford ( December 17, 1873 June 26, 1939) was an English novelist and publisher. Born Ford Hermann Hueffer he was Ford Madox Hueffer before he finally settled on the name Ford Madox Ford in honor of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter For editor of The English Review and his career in literature began. Shortly after his first novel was published, The White Peacock, in 1910Events January events January 13 The first live musical radio program. Lee De Forest broadcasts a live performance of Enrico Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera. January 26 ? Seine floods in Paris. February events February 8 The Boy Scouts of America is in Lawrence's mother died after a long illness. It is thought Lawrence may have helped his mother to die by giving her an overdose. Lawrence had an extremely close relationship with his mother and her death was a turning point in his life.

After the war Lawrence began what he termed his 'savage pilgrimage'. He left England, never to return, and with Frieda spent the rest of his life travelling, settling down for only short periods. His travels took him to France, Italy, Ceylon, Australia, America and Mexico. He dreamed of establishing a utopian community on a ranch in Taos, New Mexico but another bout of pneumonia forced him to return to Europe.

He died in Vence , France in 1930. Frieda returned to live on the ranch in Taos and later brought Lawrence's ashes to rest there.

2 Works

Realism was the main feature of Lawrence's writings and his unflinching depictions of the gritty struggles of everyday life give many of his novels a melancholy tone. His poems help to balance this with many powerful an evocative descriptions of nature, although moments of beauty are present in his books.

Among his many works, most famous are his novels Sons and Lovers ( 1913), The Rainbow ( 1915), Women in Love ( 1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover ( 1928). These all take place in and around Eastwood, Lawrence's birthplace, which was a grim industrial mining town. Lawrence would return here in his literature despite leaving it in real life and it holds an importance to him in a similar way Wessex does for Thomas Hardy's whom Lawrence admired.

Kangaroo, Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent are usually considered together as his "leadership novels". They contain some of the ideas that contributed to his plan for Rananim. The name meaning 'celebrations' and taken from a Hebrew folk song, this was the community of like-minded writers and artists that he hoped to establish in New Mexico but little came of it.

Part of the realist nature of his writing meant that he could not obscure the subjects of sex and love in his books and his descriptions of sex were shockingly frank for the period. The Rainbow was banned for its obscenity which consisted of the use of swear words and talk of sex and one publisher called Sons and Lovers "the dirtiest book he had ever read."

The publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes and perhaps particularly because the lover was working-class, and an obscenity trial followed in Britain. The British publisher, Penguin Books, won the court case that ensued. He also produced a series of explicit expressionistic paintings later in life some of which were almost destroyed due to their depiction of pubic hair.

What is often forgotten amongst the claims of Lawrence as a pornographer is the fact that he was extremely religious. He was tired of the stifling Christianity of Europe and wished to rejuvenate it with earlier, tribal religions. This search for a primeval religious consciousness was part of the reason for his 'savage pilgrimage'. He was also inspired by contemporary ' process philosophy': for example works by Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and others, as well as by the works of Freud, most notably in Sons and Lovers which was also his most autobiographical work. He wished to free himself from the sexual restrictions of the past so that he could examine their place in religion but he would have been perhaps horrified if he realised his role in the " sexual revolution" of the 1960s.

3 Quotation

"He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine." -- Sons and Lovers

4 Partial list of works

Novels

The White Peacock (1911) - the tragedy of a man who marries the wrong woman
The Tresspasser (1912)
Sons and Lovers (1913) - called Paul Morel while in progress
The Rainbow (1915) - criticised for obscenity and copies were destroyed
Women in Love (1920) - sequel to The Rainbow
The Lost Girl (1920)
Aaron's Rod (1922) - about a man who walks out on his wife, with whom he has a destructive relationship, in order to start a new life
The Fox (1923) - short novel
The Captain's Doll (1923) - short novel, about an abandoned marriage and subsequent loveless affair
The Ladybird (1923) - short novel
Kangaroo (1923)
The Boy in the bush (1924) - written from a manuscript given to him by Molly Skinner .
St. Mawr (1925) - short novel, one of his two North American fictions
The Plumed Serpent (1926) - called Quetzalcoatl in progress and is about an Irish woman experiencing a Aztec religious revolution in Mexico
The Woman Who Rode Away (1928) - one of his two North American fictions about a woman who gives herself up to a group of Native Americans. this novel reveals much about Lawerence's opinion of American consciousness
The Escaped Cock/The Man Who Died (1929)
Lady Chatterley's Lover (printed privately in Florence during 1928, banned in the UK until 1960) - his most famous and highest earning novel. A story of a middle-class woman and her enlightening sexual relationship (written quite explicitly) with a gamekeeper - an outsider even to the working class. The novel condones their relationship, and is a story about living and loving passionately.

Published posthumously

Mr Noon (1984)
The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930) - short novel about a young Englishwoman in a repressive household

Unfinished

The Flying Fish

Poetry

Love Poems and others (1913)
Look! We Have Come Through! (1917)
New Poems (1918)
Bay : a book of poems (1919)
Birds, beasts and flowers (1923)
Pansies (1929)

Plays

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914)
A Collier's Friday Night (1934)
Touch and Go (1920)
David (1926) - A modern man developing out of the primordial religious self
Mornings in Mexico (1927)

Stories

The Prussian Officer and other stories (1914)

Non-fiction

Movements in European History (1921)
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921)
Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922)
Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)
Sea and Sardinia (1921) - travel book
Apocalypse (1931) - His last book touching on primitive symbolism, paganism and pre- Christian ideology

5 External links

Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, D.H. D.H. Lawrence Lawerence, D.H.

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1 Life