LAWRENCE, D.H.

“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."

David Herbert Lawrence was one of the 20^th century’s most important and controversial writers.  Born into a mining community in Nottinghamshire at the end of the nineteenth century, he was expected to work in the mines alongside his father.  However his delicate constitution and dislike of physical activity made him an unlikely miner, and fortunately his academic ability enabled him to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School, after which he found employment as a teacher.  Lawrence experimented with writing both poetry and prose during the first decade of the 20^th century, and in 1909 his friend Jessie Chambers sent some of his poems to Ford Madox Hueffer at the English Review, who promptly published them and then recommended Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, to Heinemann who published it in 1911.  In the early summer of 1913 he wrote some of his finest short stories, published as The Prussian Officer and Other Stories.  Over the following 10 years Lawrence wrote short stories, over 800 poems and some of the best known novels in 20^th century English Literature, including Sons and Lovers and Women in Love.  His most celebrated (and last) novel, however, was first published only 2 years before his death.  Privately printed in Florence in 1928, Lady Chatterly’s Lover was suppressed in Britain and America on the grounds of obscenity until the famous Grove Press v Christenberry trial in America in 1959, and the unexpurgated version of the text was not published in the UK until 1960. 

Today, more than 80 years after his death Lawrence remains an enthralling, if unconventional, figure, and his work still elicits a fascination for those who love linguistically precise literature.

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