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D.H. Lawrence

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D.H. Lawrence
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  • Born: 11 September 1885
  • Birthplace: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England
  • Died: 2 March 1930 (tuberculosis)
  • Best Known As: Author of Lady Chatterly's Lover

Name at birth: David Herbert Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence was an English novelist, poet and critic, most famous for his novels Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928). After a brief career as a teacher, Lawrence devoted himself to writing and in 1911 published his first novel, The White Peacock. In 1912 he ran off with Frieda von Richtenhof Weekley, the wife of a Nottingham University professor; after her divorce in 1914, she and Lawrence married and began travelling while he worked on his writing. They travelled through Europe and North America until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1930. Lawrence's novels are known for Oedipal anxieties and sometimes explicit descriptions of sexual relationships, a rarity in literature at the time and shocking to his contemporaries. Lady Chatterly's Lover, probably his best-known work, was considered "obscene" and was banned in the United States and England for three decades. After the 1960's, however, his books became required reading for most university students, and he is still considered an influential figure of 20th century literature. His other works include the novels Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926) and The Rainbow (1915), the play David (1926), poems collected in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1925) and a book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).

His wife, Frieda, was a cousin of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the World War I German flying ace.

 
 
Biography: David Herbert Lawrence

The English novelist, poet, and essayist David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) took as his major theme the relationship between men and women, which he regarded as disastrously wrong in his time.

Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on Sept. 11, 1885, D. H. Lawrence was the son of a little-educated coal miner and a mother of middle-class origins who fought with the father and his limited way of life so that the children might escape it or, as Lawrence once put it, "rise in the world." Their quarrel and estrangement, and the consequent damage to the children, became the subject of perhaps his most famous novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). Critics immediately regarded it as a brilliant illustration of Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. Lawrence was trained to be a teacher at Nottingham University College and taught at Davidson Road School in Croydon until 1912, when his health failed. The great friend of his youth, Jessie Chambers, who was the real-life counterpart of Miriam in Sons and Lovers, had sent some of his work to the English Review. The editor, Ford Madox Ford, hailed him at once as a find, and Lawrence began his writing career.

Major Themes

Lawrence's constant struggle for a right relationship with women came to a climax in his encounter, liaison, and marriage with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. They had met in 1912 and were married in 1914; their evolving relationship is reflected in all his work after Sons and Lovers. The fulfillment it meant to him can be seen most directly and poignantly in the volume of poems Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). Like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow (1915) and Women In Love (1920) are set in England and reflect Lawrence's deep concern with the male-female relationship.

The Lawrences lived in many parts of the world - particularly, as place affected his work, in Italy, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. Embittered by the censorship of his work and the suspicion regarding his German-born wife during the war, Lawrence sought a propitious place where his friends and he might form a colony based on individuality and talent rather than possessions. This he never realized for more than brief periods. There were quarrels and desertions, and his precarious health was a factor in the constant moves. At the end of his life he wistfully regarded himself as lacking in the societal self. He died in Vence, France, on March 2, 1930.

Lawrence's work from the war onward traces his search. His work's rhythm he described as the exploring of situations in his fiction (and, one might add, his poetry) and then the abstracting and consolidating of his thought in essays, some of book-length, like Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), and, at the very end, Apocalypse (1931). For the Australian phase there is the novel Kangaroo (1923); for New Mexico, various short stories, poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the novelette St. Mawr (1925), and essays, particularly those on the Indian dances; for Mexico, the novel The Plumed Serpent (1926) and the sketches titled Mornings in Mexico (1927); for the Mediterranean area with its pagan traditions, the novels The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron's Rod (1922) and the novelettes Sun (1928) and The Man Who Died (1931). Toward the last his imagination returned to his English origins for the scene and characters of his most notorious and controversial novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The novelette The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) reflects the same concern.

All through his career Lawrence's boldness in treating the sexual side of his characters' relationships had aroused the censorious. For example, The Rainbow was originally withdrawn and destroyed by the publisher after a complaint. But in Lady Chatterley's Lover, his last full-length novel, Lawrence went much further. The book was banned in England, and this was followed by the seizure of the manuscript of his poems Pansies and the closing of an exhibition of his paintings.

Range of His Work

Lawrence used all of the literary forms successfully, except perhaps for drama (there are a few early plays not much read or produced and David, 1926, from his latter years in the United States). He wrote strikingly good short stories all through his career. Early ones are "Odour of Chrysanthemums," "Daughters of the Vicar," "Love among the Haystacks," "The Prussian Officer," "Tickets, Please," and "The Horse-dealer's Daughter." Others, of middle and late period, are "The Border Line," "The Woman Who Rode Away," "Glad Ghosts," "The Rocking Horse Winner," "Two Blue Birds," "The Man Who Loved Islands," and "Things." He was a master of the short novel (novelette) form in The Fox, The Ladybird, The Captain's Doll (all 1923), Sun, The Virgin and the Gipsy, and The Man Who Died, this last being an extension of Christ's life into a resurrection and fulfillment in this world that lends itself to philosophically existential interpretations.

Lawrence's poetry ranges from early rhymed poems in Love Poems and Others (1913) and Amores (1925), through the freer forms of Look! We Have Come Through! and the highly experimental and free forms of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, through the deliberately doggerel satire of much of Pansies (1929) and Nettles (1930), to the less colloquial and at times classical diction and rhythm of Last Poems (1932), gathered from his manuscripts and published posthumously.

In criticism Lawrence achieved a book that is still regarded as one containing important, challenging insights, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and a number of essays on the novel that have provided themes for later critics, particularly his distinction between an author's conscious intentions and what the novel may actually be saying. Among "travel" books his Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Places (1932) are of interest. The short journalistic pieces collected in his Assorted Articles (1930) are witty and challenging. Some of his essays did not appear in book form until the appearance of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (1936), edited by Edward McDonald, who also issued two bibliographies of Lawrence's work during the author's lifetime.

An Assessment

The contemporary Spanish novelist Ramon Sender said of Lawrence that he saw the world as if he were the first man. Lawrence was no Wordsworthian boy losing his first inspiration to the onset of time and the prison house, though there was much to fight. In Apocalypse he observed: "Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."

Interest in Lawrence has come to surpass that in more favored, by birth and education, contemporaries. His work does not seem to date. After relative neglect following his death, his books came back into print, and he is the subject of numerous memoirs, biographies, and critical studies. This is probably because so many of the problems he dealt with are increasingly urgent and because he explored them with original force, commitment, and style that appeal especially to the young. When World War I broke out, he felt that it was then more important to find the grounds of faith in life itself and the means to a new integration of the individual and society. To this he added the question of the nature of a relationship between man and man that would have the same higher significance as that between man and woman. Religiously and ethically he can be described as a vitalist, finding a source and a guide - in a sense, God - in the "life force" itself as it was manifested in nature, un-tampered with by "mental attitudes." He was concerned with how this force might be restored to a proper balance in human behavior.

Further Reading

There is a vast literature on Lawrence. Two excellent books on his life are Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (1954), and Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (3 vols., 1957-1959). The Moore book contains much new information and material in the form of letters. The Nehls study is unique; in several volumes it presents Lawrence in various phases of his life as relatives, friends, and acquaintances saw him and wrote about him. Knud Merrild, who knew Lawrence, wrote With D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico (1965), and Helen Corke, D. H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years (1965), is a recollection by another friend, particularly relevant for Lawrence's early years.

A short critical survey of Lawrence's fiction is E. W. Tedlock, Jr., D. H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel (1963). For the nuances perceived by one who frequently championed Lawrence against both real and imagined enemies, and for a series of close readings, see the study of his novels by F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence (1930) and D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955).

Additional Sources

Worthen, John, D.H. Lawrence: a literary life, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Pinion, F. B., A D. H. Lawrence companion: life, thought, and works, New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979, 1978.

Burgess, Anthony, Flame into being: the life and work of D.H. Lawrence, New York: Arbor House, 1985.

Pinkney, Tony, D.H. Lawrence, New York: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1990.

 
Black Biography: Robert H. Lawrence, Jr.

astronaut; aviator

Personal Information

Born Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., October 2, 1935 in Chicago, Illinois; died December 8, 1967 in a training jet crash at Edwards Air Force Base, California; the son of Robert Lawrence, Sr. and Gwendolyn Duncan, a civil service worker; married Barbara Cress, 1958; children: son Tracey.
Education: Bradley University, B.A., chemistry, 1956; Air Force Institute of Technology, 1961; Ohio State University, Ph.D., physical chemistry, 1965; Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School, 1967.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Air Force, 1956-67.

Career

Air Force Major, astronaut.

Life's Work

When selected to become the first African American to enter the United States's space program in 1967, Major Robert H. Lawrence, Jr. humbly regarded the appointment as, "just another of the things we look forward to in the normal progression of civil rights in this country." Sadly, the progression was halted just six months later when Lawrence was killed in a training mission. For thirty years following Lawrence's death, officials at the Astronaut Memorial Foundation declined to recognize him as an astronaut thus denying him the status to be included on the Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In 1997, however, that decision was overturned and Lawrence's name was added to the Space Mirror, ensuring Lawrence's rightful place in the history of the space program.

Born Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., in Chicago, in 1935, his parents divorced when he was a toddler and Robert and his older sister Barbara lived with their mother in the Good Neighbor Apartments in a poor Chicago neighborhood. While Lawrence was still a young child, his mother married Charles Duncan and Robert and his sister were raised in a loving, nurturing home where the union of accomplishments and humility were stressed, as well as independence and self-discipline. "This may sound unbelievable, but I don't know of any occasion when I had to discipline either of my children," Lawrence's mother, Gwendolyn Duncan recalled to David Llores of Ebony. "They had a discipline that must have come from within."

While in elementary school, Lawrence strayed from the stereotype of an inner-city child by developing an appreciation for model airplanes while at the same time fostering an enthusiasm for chess. "He was scholarly and serious," the senior Robert Lawrence admitted to Llores. "As a small boy the expression on his face reflected a kind of dedication. But I didn't consider him a precocious child." Lawrence was also passionate about science, particularly chemistry, and each Christmas he'd request a bigger and more advanced chemistry set.

By the time Lawrence reached Englewood High School in 1948 his aptitude for science and other subjects propelled him to the top of the class. By graduation Lawrence was rated as a superior and excellent student by the faculty, graduated 17th in a class of 161, and was one of ten students voted most likely to succeed. Although Lawrence won a four-year brotherhood scholarship to Indiana University, he decided to enroll in Bradley University, whose campus was in nearby Peoria, Illinois, and major in chemistry.

While at Bradley Lawrence entered the Air Force Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC) where his penchant for self-discipline enabled him to rise quickly to the rank of lieutenant colonel making him the second highest ranking cadet at the school. At the same time, in addition to his studies and various part-time jobs, Lawrence met and began to date Barbara Cress, the daughter of a Chicago doctor. Soon after receiving his bachelors degree in chemistry, Lawrence was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and a year later was assigned to an air base in Germany as an instructor pilot. Several months later, in 1958, when Lawrence's then-fiancee Barbara was asked by her father what she wanted as a graduation present after earning her bachelors degree in psychology, she requested a trip to Germany. On July 1 of that year the two married and their son Tracey was born a year later.

Returning to the United States in 1961, Lawrence, through the Air Force Institute of Technology, entered Ohio State University as a doctoral student in physical science. Here, Lawrence's devotion to his studies was unwavering and he maintained a grade-point average that exceeded 3.5 on a four-point scale with such challenging courses as nuclear chemistry, photochemistry, chemical kinetics, advanced inorganic chemistry, and thermodynamics. "He was probably the best graduate student I've ever advised," Dr. Richard Firestone declared to Charles E. Brown and Reginald McCafferty of Jet in 1967. "He {was} very intelligent and he worked very hard. In fact, he worked as hard as a grad student should which is unusual....Also {he had} a lot of courage...not the kind of courage one needs to fly a jet air craft, but intellectual courage. He was quite a resourceful student, the kind who thinks for himself."

In 1965 Lawrence earned his Ph.D. after delivering his complex doctoral dissertation entitled "The Mechanism of the Tritium Beta- Ray Induced Exchange Reactions of Deuterium with Methane and Ethane in the Gas Phase." And while Lawrence would later play down his position as the first African American to be selected to be an astronaut, it was clear when he delivered his thesis that he understood his role as a pioneer and appreciated the efforts of those who came before him. In his dissertation he wrote: "This work is dedicated to those American Negroes who have spent their lives in the performance of menial tasks struggling to overcome both natural and man-made problems of survival. To such men and women, scientific investigation would seem a grand abstraction. However, it has been their endeavors which have supplied both the wherewithal and motivation that initiated and helped sustain this effort."

In the mid-1960s America's quest for space was in its infancy but also at its most enthusiastic. Lawrence, with his scientist's curiosity and his love of flying wanted to be one of the men to explore the vastness of space and help answer the many questions sure to arise. Twice he applied to NASA but was turned down both times, despite his Ph.D. and more than 2,000 hours of flying time. Instead, he applied to the Air Force's Aerospace Research Pilot School where he was accepted. Upon graduation, Lawrence was one of four men chosen for the Department of Defense's Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), a military space station program designed to study the military implications of space flight and information gathering. Each mission would be a two-man, 30-day flight which would have begun in 1970.

In June of 1967 a press conference was held to introduce the four pilots but special emphasis was placed on Lawrence. As the first African American to be selected for space travel, Lawrence was asked if he felt he had to try harder than other candidates for the program because of his skin color. "No," Lawrence replied as quoted in the New York Times. "I feel this is the culmination of a lot of effort that people put into preparing me for this, and I feel it is an expression of success that they should enjoy rather than I." Lawrence went on to answer a question confirming that he faced some problems getting ahead because of his race, "but exactly what problems an individual faces is hard to say. I've been fortunate at certain junctures in my life. People happened to be at the right time to supply me with the necessary motivation."

The four candidates went on to join 12 previously selected "aerospace research pilots" at Edwards Air Force Base in September of 1967 for training. Part of the six-month training included flying an F-104, described by some as "a missile with a man in it." It was while attempting to land the plane, on December 8, 1967, that Lawrence and Major Harvey Royer, the pilot flying the plane, hit the runway too soon. The landing gear collapsed on contact and the canopy shattered as the plane dragged along the runway for 200 feet. The plane then bounced in the air again and floated above the runway for another 1,800 feet. Royer ejected and escaped with serious injuries. Lawrence ejected as well, but too low for his parachute to open and his body, still strapped into his ejector seat, landed 75 feet away from the wreck. He died instantly at the age of 31. It would be eleven years before another African American would be selected to undergo astronaut training and not until 1983 when a black man, Guion Bluford, would travel to space.

Conspiracy speculation arose and faded as to the cause of Lawrence's death and many were still unsatisfied with the investigation. Some people were pleased that a black man would not be among those exploring this new frontier. "After Bob was killed I got a letter from some irate citizen that said they were glad he was dead because now there would be no coons on the moon," Lawrence's widow, Barbara, is quoted as saying in Black Stars in Orbit. "Mixed in with the sympathy cards, every once in a while you'd open an envelope and there would be a letter or a note saying how happy they were that the event had taken place."

In 1989 the Astronaut Memorial Foundation (AMF) erected the Space Mirror Memorial in honor of those astronauts who gave their lives for the space program, but Robert Lawrence's name was not included because he had never flown 50 miles from the Earth's surface--one of the requirements according to NASA and the various military branches--and so technically was not considered a "real astronaut." In 1993 and again in 1996, space historian James Oberg initiated an effort to have Lawrence's name added to the Space Mirror but without success. Among the evidence Oberg used to persuade the AMF to include Lawrence was the fact that when the MOL project was canceled in 1969 all the officers were transferred to NASA as astronauts, as Lawrence would have had he not been killed in a training mission. In addition, a 1989 Congressional Research Service report includes Lawrence's biography in the "astronauts" section and his name is on a list of "astronauts" who died in the course of their work. Finally in February of 1997, the Air Force officially recognized Lawrence as an astronaut, enabling the AMF to etch his name in the Space Mirror.

Awards

First African American chosen for spaceflight training as one of four pilots selected to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program, 1967; Robert H. Lawrence, Jr. Elementary School for Mathematics and Science named in his honor, 1994; awarded astronaut status, 1997.

Further Reading

Books

  • Burns, Khephra and William Miles, Black Stars in Orbit: NASA's African American Astronauts, Gulliver Books, 1995.
  • Cassutt, Michael, Who's Who in Space, Macmillan Publishing, 1993.
  • Phelps, J. Alfred, They Had A Dream: The Story of African-American Astronauts, Presidio Press, 1994.
  • Sammons, Vivian Ovelton, Blacks in Science and Medicine, Hemisphere Publishing Co., 1990.
Periodicals
  • Ebony, February 1968, p. 90.
  • Jet, July 20, 1967, p. 14; December 21, 1967, p. 6; December 28, 1967, p. 8; June 6, 1994, p. 58; February 24, 1997, p. 39.
  • New York Times, July 1, 1967, p. 1; December 9, 1967, p. 25.
  • Rocky Mountain News, February 3, 1967, p. 34A.
  • USA Today, November 25, 1996, p. 13A; November 29, 1996, p 12A.

— Brian Escamilla

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: David Herbert Lawrence

(born Sept. 11, 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, Eng. — died March 2, 1930, Vence, France) English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist. The son of a Midlands coal miner and an educated mother, he began to write in 1905 and earned a teaching certificate in 1908. Ford Madox Ford published much of Lawrence's early work in the English Review and helped place his first novel, The White Peacock (1911). Lawrence often drew his themes from his own life and relationships. Sons and Lovers (1913) is a clearly autobiographical novel about working-class family life. In 1914 he married a German woman, Frieda Weekley. The object of hostility and suspicion during World War I because of his pacifism and her origins, the couple lived in various countries after 1919, never returning to England. The Rainbow (1915) and its sequel, Women in Love (1920), trace the sickness of modern civilization to the effects of industrialization upon the human psyche. Kangaroo (1923) describes the persecution he experienced during the war. The Plumed Serpent (1926) was inspired by his fascination with Aztec culture. Lawrence's writing is notable for its intensity and its erotic sensuality; several of his works, including Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), were banned as obscene. He died of the tuberculosis that had plagued him from an early age.

For more information on David Herbert Lawrence, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence, D. H. (1885-1930). Nottinghamshire miner's son destined for notoriety as the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). His autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913) sketches the background from which he escaped, first to London and then the continent. With him went Frieda von Richthofen, their early struggles recorded in his poem sequence Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). The frankness of his approach led to prosecution of The Rainbow (1915). Women in Love (1920) rivals Joyce's Ulysses as the greatest novel of the century.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Lawrence, D. H.
(David Herbert Lawrence), 1885–1930, English author, one of the primary shapers of 20th-century fiction.

Life

The son of a Nottingham coal miner, Lawrence was a sickly child, devoted to his refined but domineering mother, who insisted upon his education. He graduated from the teacher-training course at University College, Nottingham, in 1905 and became a schoolmaster in a London suburb. In 1909 some of his poems were published in the English Review, edited by Ford Madox Ford, who was also instrumental in the publication of Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911).

Lawrence eloped to the Continent in 1912 with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, a German noblewoman who was the wife of a Nottingham professor; they were married in 1914. During World War I the couple was forced to remain in England; Lawrence's outspoken opposition to the war and Frieda's German birth aroused suspicion that they were spies. In 1919 they left England, returning only for brief visits. Their nomadic existence was spent variously in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Australia, the United States (New Mexico), and Mexico. Lawrence died at the age of 45 of tuberculosis, a disease with which he had struggled for years.

Works

Lawrence believed that industrialized Western culture was dehumanizing because it emphasized intellectual attributes to the exclusion of natural or physical instincts. He thought, however, that this culture was in decline and that humanity would soon evolve into a new awareness of itself as being a part of nature. One aspect of this “blood consciousness” would be an acceptance of the need for sexual fulfillment. His three great novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1921), concern the consequences of trying to deny humanity's union with nature.

After World War I, Lawrence began to believe that society needed to be reorganized under one superhuman leader. The novels containing this theme—Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), and The Plumed Serpent (1926)—are all considered failures. Lawrence's most controversial novel is Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), the story of an English noblewoman who finds love and sexual fulfillment with her husband's gamekeeper. Because their lovemaking is described in intimate detail (for the 1920s), the novel caused a sensation and was banned in England and the United States until 1959.

All of Lawrence's novels are written in a lyrical, sensuous, often rhapsodic prose style. He had an extraordinary ability to convey a sense of specific time and place, and his writings often reflected his complex personality. Lawrence's works include volumes of stories, poems, and essays. He also wrote a number of plays, travel books such as Etruscan Places (1932), and volumes of literary criticism, notably Studies in Classic American Literature (1916).

Bibliography

See the Portable D. H. Lawrence, ed. by D. Trilling (1947); his collected letters (ed. with introduction by H. T. Moore, 1962); his complete poems, ed. by V. De Sola Pinto and F. W. Roberts (1977); biographies by J. M. Murray (1931), G. Trease (1973), H. T. Moore (rev. ed. 1974), J. Meyers (1990), P. Callow (1998 and 2003), and J. Worthen (2005), and series biography by J. Worthen (Vol. I, 1991), M. Kinkead-Weekes (Vol. II, 1996), and D. Ellis (Vol III., 1998); D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (1994) by B. Maddox; and The Cambridge Biography; studies by D. Cavitch (1970), R. E. Pritchard (1972), S. Spender, ed. (1973), S. Sanders (1974), and J. Meyers (1982 and 1985).

 
Works: Works by D. H. Lawrence
(1885-1930)

1923Studies in Classic American Literature. One of the landmark critical treatments of American literature, Lawrence's volume begins with an introductory essay, "The Spirit of the Place," before proceeding to a series of provocative interpretations of the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.

 
Quotes By: D. H. Lawrence

Quotes:

"Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes."

"The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else."

"You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies."

"Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth."

"But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more."

"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

See more famous quotes by D. H. Lawrence

 
Wikipedia: D. H. Lawrence
D.H.Lawrence

Lawrence, age 21 (1906)
Born: 11 September 1885(1885--)
Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom
Died: 2 March 1930 (aged 44)
Vence, France
Occupation: Novelist
Writing period: 1907 – 1930
Genres: Realism
Subjects: Travel, Literary Criticism
Debut works: Novel: The White Peacock

Short Story: Odour of Chrysanthemums

Play: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd
Influences: Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Lev Shestov, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman
Influenced: Anthony Burgess, A. S. Byatt, Colm Tóibín, Tennesee Williams, Dylan Thomas

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September, 1885 – 2 March, 1930) was a very important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour.

Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage."[1] At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation."[2] Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists object to the attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works.

Life

Early life (1885-1912)

The fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner, and Lydia, née Beardsall, a former schoolmistress, David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, and spent his formative years in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom. His birthplace, in Eastwood, 8a Victoria Street, is now a museum. His working class background and the tensions between his mismatched parents provided the raw material for a number of his early works and Lawrence would return to this locality, which he was to call "the country of my heart,"[3] as a setting for much of his fiction.

The young Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School from 1891 until 1898, becoming the first local pupil to win a County Council scholarship to Nottingham High School in nearby Nottingham. He left in 1901, working for three months as a junior clerk at Haywood's surgical appliances factory before a severe bout of pneumonia ended this career. Whilst convalescing he often visited Haggs Farm, the home of the Chambers family and began a friendship with Jessie Chambers. An important aspect of this relationship with Jessie and other adolescent acquaintances was a shared love of books, an interest that lasted throughout Lawrence's life. In the years 1902 to 1906 Lawrence served as a pupil teacher at the British School, Eastwood. He went on to become a full-time student and received a teaching certificate from University College Nottingham in 1908. During these early years he was working on his first poems, some short stories, and a draft of a novel, Laetitia, that was eventually to become The White Peacock. At the end of 1907 he won a short story competition in the Nottingham Guardian, the first time that he had gained any wider recognition for his literary talents.

In the autumn of 1908 the newly qualified Lawrence left his childhood home for London. Whilst teaching in Davidson Road School, Croydon he continued writing. Some of the early poetry, submitted by Jessie Chambers, came to the attention of Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of the influential The English Review. Hueffer then commissioned the story Odour of Chrysanthemums which, when published in that magazine, encouraged Heinemann, a London publisher, to ask Lawrence for more work. His career as a professional author now began in earnest, although he taught for a further year. Shortly after the final proofs of his first published novel The White Peacock appeared in 1910, Lawrence's mother died. She had been ill with cancer. The young man was devastated and he was to describe the next few months as his "sick year." It is clear that Lawrence had an extremely close relationship with his mother and his grief following her death became a major turning point in his life, just as the death of Mrs. Morel forms a major turning point in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, a work that faithfully records much of the writer's provincial upbringing.

In 1911 Lawrence was introduced to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader, who acted as a mentor, provided further encouragement, and became a valued friend. Throughout these months the young author revised Paul Morel, the first sketch of what was to become Sons and Lovers. In addition, a teaching colleague, Helen Corke, gave him access to her intimate diaries about an unhappy love affair, which formed the basis of The Trespasser, his second novel. In November 1911 pneumonia struck once again. After recovering his health Lawrence decided to abandon teaching in order to become a full time author. He also broke off an engagement to Louie Burrows, an old friend from his days in Nottingham and Eastwood.

Blithe spirits (1912-1914)

In March 1912 the author met the free spirited woman with whom he was to share the rest of his life. She was six years older than her new lover, married and with three young children. Frieda Weekley née von Richthofen was then the wife of Lawrence's former modern languages professor from Nottingham University, Ernest Weekley. Frieda was bored with her marriage and she had already had brief affairs with other lovers, including Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud. She now eloped with Lawrence to her parent's home in Metz, a garrison town in Germany near the disputed border with France. Their stay here included Lawrence's first brush with militarism when he was arrested and accused of being a British spy, before being released following an intervention from Frieda's father. After this encounter Lawrence left for a small hamlet to the south of Munich where he was joined by Frieda for their "honeymoon," later memorialised in the series of love poems entitled Look! We Have Come Through (1917).

From Germany they walked southwards across the Alps to Italy, a journey that was recorded in the first of his brilliant travel books, a collection of linked essays entitled Twilight in Italy and the unfinished novel, Mr Noon. During his stay in Italy, Lawrence completed the final version of Sons and Lovers that, when published in 1913, was acknowledged to represent a vivid portrait of the realities of working class provincial life. The couple returned to England in 1913 for a short visit. Lawrence now encountered and befriended John Middleton Murry, the critic, and the short story writer from New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield. Lawrence and Frieda soon went back to Italy, staying in a cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia. Here he started writing the first draft of a work of fiction that was to be transformed into two of his finest novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. Eventually Frieda obtained her divorce. The couple returned to England at the outbreak of World War I and were married on the 13 July, 1914.

The nightmare (1914-1919)

Frieda's German parentage and Lawrence's open contempt for militarism meant that they were viewed with suspicion in wartime England and lived in near destitution. The Rainbow (1915) was suppressed after an investigation into its alleged obscenity in 1915. Later, they were even accused of spying and signalling to German submarines off of the coast of Cornwall where they lived at Zennor. During this period he finished a sequel to The Rainbow, that many regard as his masterpiece. This radical new work, Women in Love, is a key text of European modernism. In it Lawrence explores the destructive features of contemporary civilization through the evolving relationships of four major characters as they reflect upon the value of the arts, politics, economics, sexual experience, friendship and marriage. This book is a bleak, bitter vision of humanity and proved impossible to publish in wartime conditions. It is now widely recognised as an English novel of great dramatic force and intellectual subtlety.

In late 1917, after constant harassment by the military authorities, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall at three days' notice under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This persecution was later described in an autobiographical chapter of his Australian novel, Kangaroo, published in 1923. He spent some months in early 1918 in the small, beautiful rural village of Hermitage near Newbury in Berkshire. He then lived for just under a year (mid-1918 to early 1919) at Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derbyshire, where he wrote one of his most poetic short stories, The Wintry Peacock. Until 1919 he was compelled by poverty to shift from address to address and barely survived a severe attack of influenza.

The savage pilgrimage begins (1919-1922)

After the traumatic experience of the war years, Lawrence began what he termed his 'savage pilgrimage', a time of voluntary exile. He escaped from England at the earliest practical opportunity, to return only twice for brief visits, and with Frieda spent the remainder of his life travelling; settling down for only short periods. This wanderlust took him to Italy, Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), Australia, North America, Mexico and after returning once more to Italy, southern France.

Lawrence abandoned England in November 1919 and headed south; first to the Abruzzi district in central Italy and then onwards to Capri and the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, Sicily. From Sicily he made brief excursions to Sardinia, Monte Cassino, Malta, Northern Italy, Austria and Southern Germany. Many of these places appeared in his writings. New novels included The Lost Girl (for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction), Aaron's Rod and the fragment entitled Mr Noon (the first part of which was published in the Phoenix anthology of his works, and the entirety in 1984). He experimented with shorter novels or novellas, such as The Captain's Doll, The Fox and The Ladybird. In addition, some of his short stories were issued in the collection England, My England and Other Stories. During these years he produced a number of poems about the natural world in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Lawrence is widely recognized as one of the finest travel writers in the English language and Sea and Sardinia, a book that describes a brief journey from Taormina undertaken in January 1921, is a vivid recreation of the life of the inhabitants of this part of the Mediterranean. Less well known is the brilliant memoir of Maurice Magnus, in which Lawrence recalls his visit to the monastery of Monte Cassino. Other non-fiction books include two studies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Movements in European History, a school textbook that was published under a pseudonym, a reflection of his blighted reputation in England.

Seeking a new world (1922-1925)

In late February 1922 the Lawrences left Europe behind with the intention of migrating to the United States. They sailed in an easterly direction, first to Ceylon and then on to Australia. A short residence in Darlington, Western Australia, which included an encounter with local writer Mollie Skinner, was followed by a brief stop in the small coastal town of Thirroul in New South Wales, during which Lawrence completed Kangaroo, a novel about local fringe politics that also revealed a lot about his wartime experiences in Cornwall.

Resuming their journey, Frieda and Lawrence finally arrived in the USA in September 1922. Here they encountered Mabel Dodge Luhan, a prominent socialite, and considered establishing a utopian community on what was then known as the 160-acre Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and Frieda acquired the property, now called the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, in 1924 in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. By all accounts Lawrence loved this ranch high up in the mountains, the only home that he ever owned. He stayed in New Mexico for two years, with extended visits to Lake Chapala and Oaxaca in Mexico.

Whilst in the New World, Lawrence rewrote and published his Studies in Classic American Literature, a set of critical essays begun in 1917, and later described by Edmund Wilson as "one of the few first-rate books that have ever been written on the subject." These provocative and original interpretations, with their insights into symbolism, New England Transcendentalism and the puritan sensibility, were a significant factor in the revival of the reputation of Herman Melville during the early 1920s. In addition, Lawrence completed a number of new fictional works, including The Boy in the Bush, The Plumed Serpent, St Mawr, The Woman who Rode Away, The Princess and assorted short stories. He also found time to produce some more travel writing, such as the collection of linked excursions that became Mornings in Mexico.

A brief voyage to England at the end of 1923 was a failure and he soon returned to Taos, convinced that his life as an author now lay in America. However, in March 1925 he suffered a near fatal attack of malaria and tuberculosis whilst on a third visit to Mexico. Although he eventually recovered, the diagnosis of his condition obliged him to return once again to Europe. He was dangerously ill and poor health limited his ability to travel for the remainder of his life.

Approaching death (1925-1930)

Lawrence and Frieda made their home in a villa in Northern Italy, living near to Florence whilst he wrote The Virgin and the Gipsy and the various versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). This book, his last major novel, was initially published in private editions in Florence and Paris and reinforced his notoriety. Lawrence responded robustly to those who claimed to be offended, penning a large number of satirical poems, published under the title of "Pansies" and "Nettles", as well as a tract on Pornography and Obscenity.

The return to Italy allowed Lawrence to renew some of his old friendships and during these years he was particularly close to Aldous Huxley, a loyal companion who was to edit the first collection of Lawrence's letters after his death, along with a generous memoir. With another friend, the artist Earl Brewster, Lawrence found the time to visit a number of local archaeological sites in April 1927. The resulting essays describing these visits to old tombs were written up and collected together as Sketches of Etruscan Places, a beautiful book that contrasts the lively past with Mussolini's fascism.

Final resting place, near Taos
Enlarge
Final resting place, near Taos

Lawrence continued to produce fiction, including short stories and The Escaped Cock (also published as The Man Who Died), an unorthodox reworking of the Christian belief of the resurrection that affirms the life of the body. During these final years Lawrence renewed a serious interest in oil painting. Official harassment persisted and an exhibition of some of these pictures at the Warren Gallery in London was raided by the British police in mid 1929 and a number of works were confiscated. Nine of the Lawrence oils have been on permanent display in the La Fonda Hotel in Taos since shortly after his death. They hang in a small office behind the hotel's front desk and are available for viewing.

He continued to write despite his physical frailty. In his last months he authored numerous poems, reviews, essays, and a robust defence of his last novel against those who sought to suppress it. His last significant work was a spirited reflection on the New Testament Book of Revelation, Apocalypse. After being discharged from a sanatorium he died at the Villa Robermond, Vence, France in 1930 at the age of 44 due to complications from Tuberculosis. Frieda returned to live on the ranch in Taos and later her third husband brought Lawrence's ashes to rest there in a small chapel set amidst the mountains of New Mexico.

Sexuality

Despite his marriage to Frieda, it was during the years in which Women in Love was being written that Lawrence developed a sexual relationship, in the town of Tregerthen, with a Cornish farmer by the name of William Henry Hocking [citation needed]. The affair, brief though it was, seems to indicate that Lawrence's fascination with themes of homosexuality, which he would explore further in Women in Love and Aaron's Rod especially, related to his own, personal sexuality. Indeed, in a letter written during 1913, he writes, "I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not…" [4] He is also quoted as saying, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about sixteen."[5]

Posthumous reputation

The obituaries following Lawrence's death were, with the notable exception of E. M. Forster, unsympathetic, ill-informed or hostile. Fortunately there were those who articulated a more balanced recognition of the significance of this author's life and works. For example, his longtime friend Catherine Carswell summed up his life in a letter to the periodical Time and Tide published on 16 March 1930. In response to his mean-spirited critics she claimed:

In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and life-long delicacy, poverty that lasted for three quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and he was right. He painted and made things, and sang, and rode. He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man's, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed. Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilization and the cant of literary cliques. He would have laughed lightly and cursed venomously in passing at the solemn owls -- each one secretly chained by the leg -- who now conduct his inquest. To do his work and lead his life in spite of them took some doing, but he did it, and long after they are forgotten, sensitive and innocent people -- if any are left -- will turn Lawrence's pages and will know from them what sort of a rare man Lawrence was.

A defense of Lawrence was also put forward by Aldous Huxley in his introduction to a collection of letters published in 1932. However, the most influential advocate of Lawrence's contribution to literature was the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis who asserted that the author had made an important contribution to the tradition of English fiction. Leavis stressed that The Rainbow, Women in Love, and the short stories and tales were major works of art. Later, the Lady Chatterley Trial of 1960, and subsequent publication of the book, ensured Lawrence's popularity (and notoriety) with a wider public.

Some modern critics, including Lawrence biographer Brenda Maddox, have charged that Lawrence was over-prolific, and that his reputation was harmed by the amount of simply bad writing that he published; however, Lawrence made his living exclusively by his writing, and as a result wrote more commercial work than modernists such as Joyce or Woolf.

A number of feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have questioned Lawrence's sexual politics, and this questioning has damaged his reputation in some quarters since then. On the other hand, Lawrence continues to find an audience for his artistic vision, and the ongoing publication of a new scholarly edition of his letters and writings has demonstrated the range of his achievement.

Also, in the classic film Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson's character makes a toast to Lawrence in the scene outside the jail house.

Works

Novels

Lawrence is perhaps best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Within these Lawrence explores the possibilities for life and living within an Industrial setting. In particular Lawrence is concerned with the nature of relationships that can be had within such settings. Though often classed as a realist, Lawrence's use of his characters can be better understood with reference to his philosophy. His use of sexual activity, though shocking at the time, has its roots in this highly personal way of thinking and being. It is worth noting that Lawrence was very interested in human touch behaviour (see Haptics) and that his interest in physical intimacy has its roots in a desire to restore our emphasis on the body, and re-balance it with what he perceived to be western civilization's slow process of over-emphasis on the mind.

Short stories

Amongst the most praised, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories provides insight into Lawrence's attitudes during the war years. His American volume The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories develops his themes of leadership as explored in the novels Kangaroo The Plumed Serpent and Fanny and Annie. 'The Fox'

Poetry

Although best known for his novels, Lawrence wrote almost eight hundred poems, most of them relatively short. His first poems were written in 1904 at the age of nineteen and two of his poems, Dreams Old and Dreams Nascent, were among his earliest published works in The English Review. His early works clearly place him in the school of Georgian poets, a group not only named after the present monarch but also to the romantic poets of the previous Georgian period whose work they were trying to emulate. What typified the entire movement, and Lawrence's poems of the time, were well-worn poetic tropes and deliberately archaic language. Many of these poems display what John Ruskin called the "pathetic fallacy," the tendency to ascribe human emotions to animals and even inanimate objects.

It was the flank of my wife
I touched with my hand, I clutched with my hand,
rising, new-awakened from the tomb!
It was the flank of my wife
whom I married years ago
at whose side I have lain for over a thousand nights
and all that previous while, she was I, she was I;
I touched her, it was I who touched and I who was touched.
-- excerpt, New Heaven and Earth

Just as the first world war dramatically changed the work of many of the poets who saw service in the trenches, Lawrence's own work saw a dramatic change, during his miserable war years in Cornwall. He had the works of Walt Whitman to thank for showing him the possibilities of free verse. He set forth his manifesto for much of his later verse in the introduction to New Poems. "We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit...But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm." Many of his later works took the idea of free verse to the extremes of lacking all rhyme and metre so that they are little different from short ideas or memos, which could well have been written in prose.

Lawrence rewrote many of his novels several times to perfect them and similarly he returned to some of his early poems when they were collected in 1928. This was in part to fictionalise them, but also to remove some of the artifice of his first works. As he put in himself: "A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him." His best known poems are probably those dealing with nature such as those in Birds Beasts and Flowers and Tortoises. Snake, one of his most frequently anthologised, displays some of his most frequent concerns; those of man's modern distance from nature and subtle hints at religious themes.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.
-- excerpt, Snake

Look! We have come through! is his other work from the period of the end of the war and it reveals another important element common to much of his writings; his inclination to lay himself bare in his writings. Although Lawrence could be regarded as a writer of love poems, his usually deal in the less romantic aspects of love such as sexual frustration or the sex act itself. Ezra Pound in his Literary Essays complained of Lawrence's interest in his own "disagreeable sensations" but praised him for his "low-life narrative." This is a reference to Lawrence's dialect poems akin to the Scots poems of Robert Burns, in which he reproduced the language and concerns of the people of Nottinghamshire from his youth.

Tha thought tha wanted ter be rid o' me.
'Appen tha did, an' a'.
Tha thought tha wanted ter marry an' se
If ter couldna be master an' th' woman's boss,
Tha'd need a woman different from me,
An' tha knowed it; ay, yet tha comes across
Ter say goodbye! an' a'.
-- excerpt, The Drained Cup

Pound was the chief proponent of modernist poetry and although Lawrence's works after his Georgian period are clearly in the Modernist tradition, they were often very different to many other modernist writers. Modernist works were often austere works in which every word was carefully worked on and hard-fought for. Lawrence felt all poems had to be personal sentiments and that spontaneity was vital for any work. He called one collection of poems Pansies partly for the simple ephemeral nature of the verse but also a pun on the French word panser, to dress or bandage a wound. His wounds still needed soothing for the reception he regularly received in England with The Noble Englishman and Don't Look at Me being removed from the official edition of Pansies on the grounds of obscenity. Even though he lived most of the last ten years of his life abroad, his thoughts were often still on England. His last work Nettles published in 1930 just eleven days after his death were a series of bitter, "nettling" but often amusing attacks on the moral climate of England.

O the stale old dogs who pretend to guard
the morals of the masses,
how smelly they make the great back-yard
wetting after everyone that passes.
-- excerpt, The Young and Their Moral Guardians

Two notebooks of Lawrence's unprinted verse were posthumously published as Last Poems and More Pansies.

Literary criticism

Lawrence's criticism of other authors often provides great insight into his own thinking and writing. Of particular note is his Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays and Studies in Classic American Literature. In the latter, Lawrence's responses to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe shed particular light on the nature of Lawrence's craft.

Philosophy

Lawrence continued throughout his life to develop his highly personal philosophy, many aspects of which would prefigure the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s. His unpublished introduction to Sons and Lovers established the duality central to much of his fiction. This is done with reference to the Holy Trinity. As his philosophy develops, Lawrence moves away from more direct Christian analogies and instead touches upon Mysticism, Buddhism, and Pagan theologies. There could also be seen to be Rosicrucian and Esoteric aspects to much of his writing. In some respects, Lawrence was a forerunner of the growing interest in the occult that occurred in the twentieth century, though he himself would have identified with being a Christian. He may have preferred the distinction of being a New Age pioneer, particularly in a time when such ideas were seen as extreme or radical.

Paintings

D. H. Lawrence also painted a selection of erotic works. These were exhibited at the Dorothy Warren Gallery in London's Mayfair in 1929. This exhibition included A Boccaccio Story, Spring and Fight with an Amazon. The exhibition was extremely controversial, with many of the 13,000 people visiting mainly to gawk. The Daily Express reported "Fight with an Amazon represents a hideous, bearded man holding a fair-haired woman in his lascivious grip while wolves with dripping jaws look on expectantly, [this] is frankly indecent."

Quotations

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  • "Be a good animal, true to your instincts." -- The White Peacock
  • "Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband: he rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from pit, and passed into heaven in the Palmerston Arms." -- Sons and Lovers (edited out of the 1913 edition, restored in 1992)
  • "I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun." -- Letter to Harriet Monroe, 1 October 1914
  • "Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up." -- Women in Love
  • "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." -- Studies in Classic American Literature (also rendered as "Never trust the teller; trust the tale.")
  • "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically." -- Lady Chatterley's Lover
  • "Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes." -- Women in Love
  • "They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all." -- "Whales Weep Not"
  • "If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down" -- "The Rainbow"

List of Lawrence's writings

A note on the editions cited below

D H Lawrence is considered by some to be one of the great literary artists of the twentieth century - yet the texts of his writings, whether published during his lifetime or since, are, for the most part, textually corrupt.

The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D H Lawrence represents a major scholarly undertaking, which aims to provide new versions of the texts which are as close as can now be determined to those which the author would have wished to see printed. This ongoing project, started in 1979, will eventually encompass over 40 separate volumes, each complete with a high quality critical apparatus. The following list is based around the books in this authoritative standard edition.

In general, where a text is not yet available in the Cambridge series, reference has been made to other reliable sources.

Novels

  • The White Peacock (1911), edited by Andrew Robertson, Cambridge University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-521-22267-2
  • The Trespasser (1912), edited by Elizabeth Mansfield, Cambridge University Press,1981, ISBN 0-521-22264-8
  • Sons and Lovers (1913), edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron, Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-24276-2
  • The Rainbow (1915), edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-521-00944-8
  • Women in Love (1920), edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-23565-0
  • The Lost Girl (1920), edited by John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1981, ISBN 0-521-22263-X
  • Aaron's Rod (1922) edited by Mara Kalnins, Cambridge University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-521-25250-4
  • Kangaroo (1923) edited by Bruce Steele, Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-521-38455-9
  • The Boy in the Bush (1924), edited by Paul Eggert, Cambridge University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-521-30704-X
  • The Plumed Serpent (1926), edited by L.D. Clark, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-22262-1
  • Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), edited by Michael Squires, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-521-22266-4
  • The Escaped Cock (1929) (later re-published as The Man Who Died)
  • The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930)

Short stories

  • The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914), edited by John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-521-24822-1
  • England, My England and Other Stories (1922), edited by Bruce Steele, Cambridge University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-521-35267-3
  • The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird (1923), edited by Dieter Mehl, Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-35266-5
  • St Mawr and other stories (1925), edited by Brian Finney, Cambridge University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-521-22265-6
  • The Woman who Rode Away and other stories (1928) edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-521-22270-2.
  • The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories (1930), edited by Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, Lindeth Vasey, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (forthcoming), ISBN 0-521-36607-0
  • Love Among the Haystacks and other stories (1930), edited by John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-26836-2
  • Collected Stories (1994) - Everyman's Library, a comprehensive one volume edition that prints all sixty two of Lawrence's shorter fictions in chronological sequence