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D. H. Lawrence

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D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September, 1885 – 2 March, 1930) was one of the most important, prolific and controversial English writers of the 20th century, whose output spans novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. These works, taken together, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour, making him iconic in an age influenced by Freud and Nietzsche.

Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and the misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in voluntary exile, self defined as a "savage pilgrimage." 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." 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 valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists have questioned the attitudes to women and sexuality to be found within 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 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", 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 the 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 often faithfully records much of the writer's experience of his provincial upbringing.

During 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. Another symptom of his desire to refashion himself was the breaking of 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 an 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. 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 in 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, 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 recognised 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 the Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico. By all accounts Lawrence loved the ranch high up in the mountains, the only property 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 his Studies in Classic American Literature which he had begun in 1917, and completed The Boy in the Bush, The Plumed Serpent, St Mawr, The Woman who Rode Away, The Princess and a number of short stories. He also found time to produce some more travel writing, such as the collection of linked essays 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 the ability to travel for the remainder of his life.

Approaching death (1925-1930)

Lawrence and Frieda set up 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 (1929). 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 particular 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 the brutal, bombastic stupidity of Mussolini's fascism. Lawrence continued to produce fiction, including short stories and The Escaped Cock/The Man Who Died , a reworking of the Christian myth of the Resurrection. 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.

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. 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.

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 16th 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 robust defence of Lawrence was also put forward by Aldous Huxley in his generous 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 outstanding contribution to the great tradition of English fiction. Leavis stressed that The Rainbow, Women in Love, and the short stories and tales were major works of art of the highest quality. Later, the Lady Chatterley Trial of 1962 ensured Lawrence's popularity (and notoriety) with a wider public.

A number of feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have questioned Lawrence's sexual politics and this has damaged his reputation in some quarters during the last thirty years. On the other hand, he continues to find an audience who are excited by his artistic vision and the ongoing publication of a new scholarly edition of his letters and writings has demonstrated the range of his achievement.

Works

Realism was the main feature of Lawrence's writings and his unflinching depictions of the gritty struggles of everyday life give many of his novels a melancholy tone. His poems help to balance this with many powerful and evocative descriptions of nature, although moments of beauty are present in his books.

Among his many works, most famous are his novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). These all take place in and around Eastwood, Lawrence's birthplace, which was a grim industrial mining town. Lawrence would return here in his literature despite leaving it in real life, giving it an importance similar to that held by Wessex for Thomas Hardy, whom Lawrence admired.

Kangaroo, Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent are usually considered together as his "leadership novels". They contain some of the ideas that contributed to his plan for Rananim (meaning 'celebrations' and taken from a Hebrew folk song), the community of like-minded writers and artists that he hoped to establish in New Mexico. Little came of his effort, however.

Part of the realist nature of his writing meant that he could not obscure the subjects of sex and love in his books and his descriptions of sex were shockingly frank for the period. The Rainbow was banned for containing a lesbian relationship and one publisher called Sons and Lovers "the dirtiest book he had ever read."

The publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes and perhaps particularly because the lover was working-class, and an obscenity trial followed in Britain. The British publisher, Penguin Books, won the court case that ensued. He also produced a series of explicit expressionistic paintings later in life some of which were almost destroyed due to their depiction of pubic hair.

What is often forgotten amongst the claims of Lawrence as a pornographer is the fact that he was extremely religious. He was tired of the stifling Christianity of Europe and wished to rejuvenate it with earlier, tribal religions. This search for a primeval religious consciousness was part of the reason for his 'savage pilgrimage'. He was also inspired by contemporary 'process philosophy': for example works by Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and others, as well as by the works of Freud, most notably in Sons and Lovers which was also his most autobiographical work. He wished to free himself from the sexual restrictions of the past so that he could examine their place in religion but he would have been perhaps horrified if he realised his role in the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s.

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 deals 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 diferent 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. He 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 thought 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.

Quotations

Wikiquote has quotations related to D. H. Lawrence.
  • "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, 1st 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
  • Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. -- Lady Chatterley's Lover

List of Lawrence's writings

A note on the editions cited below

D H Lawrence is 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 0521222672
  • The Trespasser (1912), edited by Elizabeth Mansfield, Cambridge University Press,1981, ISBN 0521222648
  • Sons and Lovers (1913), edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron, Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0521242762
  • The Rainbow (1915), edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0521009448
  • Women in Love (1920), edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0521235650
  • Aaron's Rod (1922) edited by Mara Kalnins, Cambridge University Press, 1988, ISBN 0521252504
  • Kangaroo (1923) edited by Bruce Steele, Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 0521384559
  • The Boy in the Bush (1924), edited by Paul Eggert, Cambridge University Press, 1990, ISBN 052130704X
  • The Plumed Serpent (1926), edited by L.D. Clark, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0521222621

Short stories

  • The Prussian Officer and other stories (1914), edited by John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1983, ISBN 0521248221
  • St Mawr and other stories (1925), edited by Brian Finney, Cambridge University Press, 1983, ISBN 0521222656
  • The Woman who Rode Away and other stories (1928) edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN 0521222702
  • The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories (1930), edited by Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, Lindeth Vasey, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (forthcoming), ISBN 100521366070
  • Love Among the Haystacks and other stories (1930), edited by John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0521268362
  • Collected Stories (1994) - Everyman's Library, a comprehensive one volume edition that prints all sixty two of Lawrence's shorter fictions in chronological sequence

Poetry

  • Love Poems and others (1913)
  • Amores (1916)
  • Look! We have come through! (1917)
  • New Poems (1918)
  • Bay: a book of poems (1919)
  • Tortoises (1921)
  • The Collected Poems of D H Lawrence (1928)
  • Pansies (1929)
  • Nettles (1930)
  • Last Poems (1932)
  • Fire and other poems (1940)

Plays

  • The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914)
  • Touch and Go (1920)
  • David (1926)
  • The Fight for Barbara (1933)
  • A Collier's Friday Night (1934)
  • The Married Man (1940)
  • The Merry-go-round (1941)
  • The Complete Plays of D H Lawrence (1965)
  • The Plays, edited by Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0521242770


Non-fiction

  • Study of Thomas Hardy and other essays (1914), edited by Bruce Steele, Cambridge University Press, 1985, ISBN 0521252520 - Literary criticism and metaphysics
  • Movements in European History (1921), edited by Philip Crumpton, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0521262011 - Originally published under the name of Lawrence H. Davison
  • Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921/1922), edited by Bruce Steele, Cambridge University Press, 2004 ISBN 0521327911
  • Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and other essays (1925), edited by Michael Herbert, Cambridge University Press, 1988, ISBN 052126622X
  • A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover(1929) - Lawrence wrote this pamphlet to explain his most notorious novel
  • Apocalypse and the writings on Revelation (1931) edited by Mara Kalnins, Cambridge University Press, 1980, ISBN 0521224071 - His last book touching on primitive symbolism, paganism and pre-Christian ideology
  • Phoenix: the posthumous papers of D H Lawrence (1936)
  • Phoenix II: uncollected, unpublished and other prose works by D H Lawrence (1968)
  • Introductions and Reviews, edited by N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 0521835844
  • Late Essays and Articles, edited by James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 0521584310

Travel books

  • Twilight in Italy and Other Essays (1916), edited by Paul Eggert, Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 0521268885
  • Sea and Sardinia (1921), edited by Mara Kalnins,Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0521242754

Works translated by Lawrence

Manuscripts and early drafts of published novels and other works

Scholarly studies of Lawrence's existing manuscripts reveal him to have been a careful craftsman. He often revised his works in a radical way by rewriting them, often over a period of years. Given this, it is interesting to compare these earlier drafts with the final, published versions

  • Paul Morel (1911-12), edited by Helen Baron, Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0521560098 - an early manuscript version of Sons and Lovers
  • The First Women in Love (1916-17) edited by John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey,Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 0521373263
  • Mr Noon (1920?) - Parts I and II, edited by Lindeth Vasey, Cambridge University Press, 1984, ISBN 0521252512
  • The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of Studies in Classic American Literature, edited by Armin Arnold, Centaur Press, 1962
  • Quetzalcoatl (1925), edited by Louis L Martz, W W Norton Edition, 1998, ISBN 0-8112-1385-4 - Early draft of The Plumed Serpent
  • The First and Second Lady Chatterley novels, edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0521471168. These two books,The First Lady Chatterley and John Thomas and Lady Jane were earlier drafts of Lawrence's last novel

Letters

  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I, September 1901 - May 1913, ed. James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 1979, ISBN 100521221471
  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, June 1913 - October 1916, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 1981, ISBN 100521231116
  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume III, October 1916 - June 1921, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, Cambridge University Press, 1984, ISBN 100521231124
  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume IV, June 1921 - March 1924 , ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 100521006953
  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume V, March 1924 - March 1927, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 100521006961
  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume VI, March 1927 - November 1928 , ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, Cambridge University Press, 1991, ISBN 100521006988
  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume VII, November 1928 - February 1930, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 100521006996
  • The Letters of D. H. Lawrence,with index, Volume VIII, ed. James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 2001, ISBN 100521231175
  • The Selected Letters of D H Lawrence, Compiled and edited by James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 100521401151

Works about Lawrence

Bibliographic resources

  • Paul Poplawski(1995) The Works of D H Lawrence: a Chronological Checklist (Nottingham, D H Lawrence Society)
  • Paul Poplawski (1996) D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion (Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press)
  • P. Preston(1994)A D H Lawrence Chronology(London, Macmillan)
  • W.Roberts and P.Poplawski (2001)A Bibliography of D H Lawrence. 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
  • Charles L Ross and Dennis Jackson, eds. (1995) Editing D H Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press)
  • Keith Sagar (1979)D H Lawrence: a Calendar of his Works (Manchester, Manchester University Press)
  • Keith Sagar(1982) D H Lawrence Handbook (Manchester, Manchester University Press)


Biographical studies

  • Catherine Carswell (1932)The Savage Pilgrimage (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, reissued 1981)
  • E. T. (Jessie Chambers Wood) (1935)D H Lawrence: A Personal Record (Jonathan Cape)
  • Edward Nehls (1957-59)D H Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volumes I-III (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press)
  • Emile Delavenay (1972). D. H. Lawrence: The Man and his Work: The Formative Years, 1885-1919, trans. Katherine M. Delavenay (London: Heinemann)
  • Harry T. Moore (1974) The Priest of Love: A Life of D H Lawrence, Heinemann
  • Paul Delany (1979)D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War (Hassocks: Harvester Press)
  • G H Neville (1981) A Memoir of D H Lawrence: The Betrayal, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
  • John Worthen (1991)D H Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885 - 1912 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
  • Mark Kincaid-Weekes(1996)D H Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912 - 1922 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
  • John Worthen (1998)D H Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922 - 1930 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
  • John Worthen (2005)D H Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (London, Penguin /Allen Lane)

Literary criticism

  • Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
  • Richard Beynon, (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Women in Love (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1997).
  • Michael Black (1986) D H Lawrence: The Early Fiction (Palgrave MacMillan)
  • Michael Black (1991) D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works: A Commentary (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan)
  • Michael Black (1992) Sons and Lovers (Cambridge University Press)
  • Michael Black (2001) Lawrence's England: The Major Fiction, 1913 - 1920 (Palgrave-MacMillan)
  • Keith Brown, ed. (1990) Rethinking Lawrence, Milton Keynes: Open University Press
  • Anthony Burgess (1985) Flame Into Being: The Life And Work Of D.H. Lawrence (William Heinemann)
  • Aidan Burns (1980) Nature and Culture in D. H. Lawrence (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan)
  • L D Clark (1980) The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D H Lawrence, University of Arizona Press
  • Colin Clarke (1969) River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)
  • Carol Dix (1980) D H Lawrence and Women, Macmillan
  • R P Draper (1970) D H Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
  • Anne Fernihough (1993) D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford:Clarendon Press)
  • Anne Fernihough, ed. (2001) The Cambridge Companion to D H Lawrence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
  • Graham Holderness (1982) D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan)
  • Graham Hough (1956) The Dark Sun: A Study of D H Lawrence, Duckworth
  • Frank Kermode (1973) Lawrence (London: Fontana)
  • Mark Kinkead - Weekes (1968) The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 371-418. in Gregor, lan and Maynard Mack (eds.), Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Butt (London: Methuen,)
  • F R Leavis (1955) D H Lawrence: Novelist (London, Chatto and Windus)
  • F R Leavis (1976) Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D H Lawrence (London, Chatto and Windus)
  • Sheila Macleod (1985) Lawrence's Men and Women (London: Heinemann)
  • Barbara Mensch (1991) D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan)
  • Colin Milton (1987) Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press)
  • Robert E Montgomery (1994) The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
  • Alastair Niven (1978) D. H. Lawrence: The Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
  • Cornelia Nixon (1986) Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women (Berkeley: University of California Press)
  • Tony Pinkney (1990) D. H. Lawrence (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf)
  • Charles L. Ross (1991) Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism (Boston, Mass.: Twayne)
  • Keith Sagar (1966) The Art of D H Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
  • Keith Sagar (1985) D H Lawrence: Life into Art (University of Georgia Press)
  • Daniel J. Schneider (1986) The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas)
  • Michael Squires and Keith Cushman (1990) The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press)
  • Peter Widdowson , ed. (1992) D. H. Lawrence (London and New York: Longman 1992)
  • John Worthen (1979) D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan).
  • T R Wright (2000) D H Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
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