Life & Background
Lawrence was born in 1885 in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, the son of a miner and a former schoolteacher whose ambition for her children shaped him profoundly. He trained as a teacher and taught in Croydon before his mother's death and his early publications turned him to writing. In 1912 he eloped with Frieda von Richthofen, the German wife of his former professor and mother of three; they married in 1914 and spent the war in England under suspicion of spying, harassed and destitute, with The Rainbow suppressed for obscenity in 1915. Afterwards they travelled almost continuously — Italy, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico — in what he called his savage pilgrimage. He died of tuberculosis in France in 1930, aged forty-four.
Sons and Lovers
Gertrude Morel, educated and refined, is trapped in a marriage to Walter Morel, a Nottinghamshire miner who drinks, and transfers her thwarted ambitions to her sons. After the eldest, William, dies, she fastens on Paul. Paul becomes an art student and clerk, and falls in love with Miriam Leivers, a spiritual and intense farm girl whose relationship with him his mother resents and obstructs. Unable to reconcile physical desire with Miriam's spirituality, he turns to Clara Dawes, a separated suffragette, in a frankly sexual affair. His mother develops cancer, and Paul eventually gives her a lethal dose of morphia. Left without her, and unable to return to either woman, he turns towards the lights of the town rather than the darkness.
The novel is closely autobiographical and was reworked substantially under Frieda's influence, who introduced Lawrence to Freud; the Oedipal reading is therefore not imposed on the book but built into its composition, though Lawrence rejected Freud's system in his own later psychology writings. Its real innovation is the treatment of class as physical experience — the smell, exhaustion, and bodily rhythm of mining life set against the mother's genteel aspiration — and the presentation of sexual feeling as continuous with landscape and instinct rather than separable from them. Lawrence's prose repeats and accumulates rather than refining, a deliberate technique that Leavis defended and others have found overwrought.
Why Lawrence Matters
Lawrence made sexuality and the body legitimate subject matter for serious English fiction, and the 1960 Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, which Penguin won, is a landmark in the history of censorship and is often taken to mark the end of one period of English public morality. He is also the great novelist of the English working class from inside it. His reputation swings sharply: Leavis placed him at the summit of the great tradition, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics attacked him as a foundational text of literary misogyny, and both positions are examinable.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Sons and Lovers1913
- The Rainbow1915
- Women in Love1920
- Birds, Beasts and Flowers1923
- Studies in Classic American Literature1923
- The Plumed Serpent1926
- Lady Chatterley's Lover1928