Lawrence, D. H. 1885–1930

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Lawrence, D. H.
1885–1930

Most famous for his poetic novels, David Herbert Lawrence often explored the relationships between men and women, and between humans and nature. Riveted by the rhythmic cycles of life and the ways life in the early twentieth century seemed to alienate men and women from one another, Lawrence wrote a series of novels in which he traced families and couples as they grew away from a pre-technological culture and its life-sustaining cycles. Many of Lawrence's novels contain explicit, if lyrical, passages of sexuality, which shocked the public and which made his work, particularly Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), notorious.

Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire, the fourth child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher. Lawrence's mother had more education than his father, and her slight class superiority and his father's drinking caused unhappiness in the household. Lawrence was very close to his mother. Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottingham High School, but did not do particularly well. After completing school, he worked in a surgical supply house as a factory worker. Later, he trained as a pupil teacher, a student who works as a teacher trainee. He came down with a serious bout of pneumonia after the death of one of his older brothers, Ernest. When he recovered, he took the university entrance exams and went to Nottingham University to study to be a teacher. After leaving Nottingham, he got a job teaching at a boys' school in Croydon.

Lawrence had begun writing poetry and short stories while working as a pupil teacher, and he had one short story published as a university student. While teaching, he began writing poetry as more than a hobby. Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) took an interest in Lawrence's work and oversaw the first publication of his poetry in The English Review in 1909. Ford was interested in Lawrence's writing about his childhood and encouraged his prose as well. Ford introduced Lawrence to such other writers as H. G. Wells (1866–1946), William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Also at that time Lawrence had several intense relationships with women, including his friend and writing partner of adolescence, Jesse Chambers, his colleague Agnes Holt, and another friend, Helen Corke. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911.

When his mother became ill, Lawrence returned to Nottinghamshire on and off. He nursed his mother, terminated his relationship with Jesse Chambers, and took up a relation with Louie Burrows, to whom he became engaged. When his mother died, he returned to London, determined to develop a career as a writer, but also renewed his relationship with Helen Corke. He began a second novel, one he never published, and also began thinking of a third, Paul Morel, upon which he worked in his spare time. In 1912 he became ill again with pneumonia, quit his teaching job upon the advice of his doctors, returned to Nottinghamshire, and began to write in earnest. He renewed his intellectual relation with Jesse Chambers, and ended his engagement to Burrows.

In Nottinghamshire, he fell in love with a married woman, Frieda Weekley (nee von Richthofen), wife of a local professor and mother of three children. She had a record of extramarital dalliance, but was reluctant to admit her affairs to her husband. Instead she traveled to Germany with Lawrence on the pretext of visiting her family. In Germany, Lawrence completed his manuscript Paul Morel, which was rejected by the publisher Heinemann for being too sexually explicit, but which was published after slight revision by Duckworth. After obtaining a divorce, Frieda married Lawrence in 1914 and the two returned to England during World War I, living in Cornwall as Lawrence wrote and tried to avoid being conscripted into military service. He began a small magazine, The Signature, which failed, and wrote the novel The Rainbow (1915), which was suppressed and taken from distribution soon after publication on the grounds of obscenity. The charge of obscenity was clearly going to haunt Lawrence throughout his career as his vision of life required an expression of all its aspects. His focus on the relations between men and women demanded that he acknowledge the importance of sexuality in those relationships.

After the war, Lawrence and Frieda thankfully began to travel throughout Europe and then to the Far East, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. Australia inspired the novel Kangaroo (1923), which Lawrence wrote mostly in New Mexico while visiting Mabel Dodge Sterne. Tiring of Sterne, he and Frieda traveled to Mexico, where he renewed his inspiration for The Plumed Serpent (1926). He and Frieda returned to New York, planning to spend some time there so Lawrence could write, but after a quarrel, Frieda returned to England and Germany alone and Lawrence traveled solo through the United States. Joining back up with Frieda in England, Lawrence spent time in London, and then returned to New Mexico, where Sterne, now Mabel Luhan, presented him with a ranch. Lawrence continued to write, but his health began to fail; he suffered, first, a bronchial hemorrhage signaling tuberculosis, then typhoid.

In 1925, Lawrence and Frieda returned to England at the death of Lawrence's father, but moved on quickly to Germany and Italy, where Lawrence would spend most of the rest of his life. His health was poor, but he began work on what he originally planned as a short story. Becoming the notorious novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, this work would make him more money than any other writing. Increasingly sick with tuberculosis, Lawrence stayed in Italy, going to Paris only to oversee the publication of this last novel. He died in a sanatorium in Vence, France in 1930.

During his career Lawrence also wrote seven plays, eight collections of short stories and novellas, including The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird (1923), published eleven collections of poetry, four collections of travel writing, did translations, and wrote volumes of essays. Through his writing, Lawrence developed a lyrical style that helped define modernism, the literary movement of his time. The poetic quality of his prose made his renditions of explicit sexuality more aesthetic than pornographic, a practice finally acknowledged by the courts of the United States and Great Britain when Lady Chatterley's Lover was finally published in the late 1950s.

see also Lady Chatterley's Lover.