D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, literary critic, travel writer, essayist, and painter. He wrote in the modernist period, with an eye on modernity, social alienation, and industrialisation. At the same time, his work championed sexuality, vitality, and instinct, which helped make him one of the most disputed literary figures of his time.

Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner at Brinsley Colliery, and Lydia Lawrence, a former pupil-teacher who had been forced into manual work in a lace factory by family financial troubles. His working-class childhood in a coal mining town, and the tensions between his parents, gave him material for early fiction. He also roamed the open, hilly country and the fragments of Sherwood Forest north of Eastwood, forming a lifelong attachment to the natural world. He later wrote of this area as “the country of my heart.”

His mother was determined that her children would not earn their livings by manual labor, and Lawrence’s education carried him away from the pit. He attended Beauvale Board School from 1891 to 1898, then became the first local pupil to win a county council scholarship to Nottingham High School. After a short spell as a junior clerk ended with pneumonia, he trained and worked as a teacher. From 1902 to 1906 he was a pupil-teacher at the British School in Eastwood, and in 1908 he received a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham.

While teaching, Lawrence was already writing poems, stories, and drafts of fiction. In 1907 he won a short story competition in the Nottinghamshire Guardian. Jessie Chambers, a close early friend whose family home he visited during convalescence, submitted some of his poems to Ford Madox Ford at The English Review. Ford then commissioned “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” and the publication of that story helped bring Lawrence to the attention of Heinemann. His first published novel, The White Peacock, appeared in 1910. After another bout of pneumonia in 1911, he gave up teaching to write full time.

Lawrence is best known for novels that tested the limits of what English fiction could say about emotion, romance, sexuality, and explicit language. Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) were all subjects of censorship trials. His mother’s death from cancer in 1910 devastated him and became a major turning point in his life; his close bond with her, and his relationship with Jessie Chambers, fed directly into Sons and Lovers. In 1912 he met Frieda Weekley, with whom he would share the rest of his life, and they left England together.

Lawrence’s views and artistic choices brought him a controversial reputation. He endured persecution and the misrepresentation of his creative work, and he spent much of his life in voluntary exile, which he described as a “savage enough pilgrimage.” At the time of his death, some dismissed him as tasteless, avant-garde, or merely pornographic. Yet E. M. Forster called him “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation,” and F. R. Leavis later defended his artistic integrity and moral seriousness. His words still speak strongly because they come from conflict: class and education, body and mind, industry and nature, public outrage and private need.