D. H. Lawrence.

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

-- D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

"ONE MUST LEARN TO LOVE, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it," D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1914, "and the journey is always towards the other soul." One of the pivotal and most controversial writers of the 20th century, Lawrence explored love, romantic desire, sexuality, and male-female and male-male relationships in his novels, poems, short stories, essays, and travelogues. Seen as a sexual crusader in novels including Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence attempted to foster greater openness about sexuality in the overly intellectualized English culture. He viewed sex as the key to emotional health and sexual freedom as a liberating force from the brutal effects of industrial society. Above all, he wished to balance sex with the primitive subconscious. "I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful," he wrote about Lady Chatterley's Lover. "To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is" (The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, 1962).

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While dissecting human relationships, dramatizing power plays, and celebrating sexual desire, Lawrence depicted the struggles of daily life in early 20th-century England. His working-class upbringing in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire (East Midlands), as well as his parents' conflicts--his father, an uneducated, hard-drinking miner, had married an intellectually ambitious woman a station above him--inspired many of his fictionalized relationships. Lawrence's mismatched couples (the working-class gamekeeper Oliver Mellors and aristocratic Connie Chatterley in Lady Chatterley's Lover), his use of sexually explicit language, and his graphic portrayal of sexual desire outraged a public slowly emerging from Victorian sensibilities. His work was, in turn, censored, banned, and confiscated.

The Rainbow (1915), an antiwar novel filled with frank discussions of sex, was seized and burned; Lady Chatterley's Lover led to an obscenity trial. Although deemed by some as the literary pornographer of his time, readers around the world now recognize Lawrence as a visionary, versatile pioneer of English literary modernism.

David Herbert Lawrence, the fourth child, was born in the coal mining town of Eastwood on September 11, 1885. Although he had a deep emotional bond with his mother (portrayed as Gertrude Morel in Sons and Lovers), he resented his father, his parents' fights, and their poverty. After winning a scholarship to high school, Lawrence worked in a factory. He then studied at Nottingham University, taught in South London, and started to write. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), launched his career. In 1910, his mother died, a heartbreak retold in Sons and Lovers.

In 1912, Lawrence met and fell in love with Frieda von Richthofen, a distant relative of the "Red Baron" Manfred von Richthofen. Frieda, married to Ernest Weekley, one of Lawrence's former modern languages professors, left her husband and three children. Lawrence and his new lover, their relationship forever stormy and passionate, eloped to Germany. Accused of spying, they walked over the Alps to Italy (an episode recounted in 1916's Twilight in Italy), where Lawrence completed Sons and Lovers; they were married in London in 1914. These years were fruitful for Lawrence, who, in 1915, published The Rainbow, which was immediately banned, and poetry about the natural world. Although Lawrence and Frieda had planned to return to the continent, World War I kept them in England, where Lawrence opposed militarism and came under official censorship. He completed Women in Love in 1920.

In 1919, after their expulsion from Cornwall, Lawrence and his wife left England to begin what Lawrence called restless years of "savage pilgrimage." Poor and in ill health (he suffered from recurring bouts of pneumonia and tuberculosis his entire life), Lawrence brought Frieda to Italy, and then to Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, and Taos, New Mexico, where, invited by New York patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Sterne, they settled down at the peaceful Kiowa Ranch. These travels--and Lawrence's search for the place of sex in primeval religions--inspired many of his travel books, stories, and novels, including The Plumed Serpent (1926), about Mexico's Aztec religion. He also published some of his best poetry collections, including Pansies (1929) and Last Poems (1932), which features his well-known poem "The Ship of Death." Aware of his mortality, he ended it with the lines: "Oh build your ship of death, oh build it! / for you will need it. / For the voyage of oblivion awaits you." Another severe illness brought Lawrence back to northern Italy, where he worked on different versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover. After entering a sanatorium in Vence, France, he died from tuberculosis on March 2, 1930.

D. H. Lawrence's Sexual Politics

"It's hard to imagine that David Herbert Lawrence will ever again be read with the passion and recognition that people evidently felt 40 years ago, when his cultural war was still not won," writes art critic Jonathan Jones ("A Life in Pictures," Guardian, 11/8/02). Although Lawrence died in 1930, he perhaps reached the height of notoriety in 1960, when Penguin Books was prosecuted for publishing the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Today, many readers willing to overlook some four-letter words--the so-called f-word and its variations appear numerous times in the novel--fail to understand what the fuss was all about. "Where are the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley's Lover?" Jones asks. "We read Lawrence's Women in Love and wonder what the hell these people were so steamed up about."

Today, Lawrence's novels not only fail to shock readers; many of his theories about sex and sexual roles also seem outdated, if not downright sexist. Targets of feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s, Lawrence's ideas truly reflect his time: his belief that male domination was critical to successful sexual relations; that masturbation led away from free and natural sexuality; that the powerful mother threatened a son's romantic relationships. Other aspects of Lawrence's politics remain misunderstood. Thinking that exclusive love prevented an isolated consciousness, he defended monogamy, despite Frieda's dalliances. (Lawrence punished Lady Chatterley for her first adulterous act.) Still other parts of Lawrence's sexual politics remain unclear. Because his fiction abounds with images of male beauty and bonding, many scholars believe that Lawrence repressed his homosexuality or that his illnesses may have caused sexual dysfunction.

If Lawrence's sexual politics fail to resonate with modern readers, few other writers have as successfully captured the nuances of gender relations. "What we do have from him is a report on the sex war of his time, and no one has done it better," claims Doris Lessing. "His men and women are usually at odds, or in strange spiritual conjunctions. ... No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love. What a paradox. Lawrence often wrote nonsense about the mechanics of sex but is full of insights about men and women"--and about the centrality of sexuality in the human experience (Guardian, 7/15/06).

MAJOR WORKS

Sons and Lovers (1913)

* #9 MODERN LIBRARY'S 100 BEST NOVELS

The largely autobiographical Sons and Lovers reflects much of Lawrence's provincial, working-class upbringing and serves as a tribute to his mother, who died shortly before he began the manuscript. His first great work and one of the most accessible, the novel reworks the oedipal drama in its chronicling of possessive, all-consuming love.

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THE STORY: In an unhappy, working-class English family, Gertrude Morel transfers her former love for her hard-drinking, miner husband to her first son. She then turns to Paul, her artistic third child, and showers him with attention that resembles that of a jealous lover. While Paul finds her love simultaneously attractive and repulsive, it smothers his romantic entanglements: first with a religious farm girl, Miriam Leivers, whom he then rejects for a second woman, the more experienced, separated suffragette, Clara Dawes. When Gertrude falls gravely ill, Paul rejects romantic and sexual love because his mother, whom he loves "better than his own life," still overshadows his life.

"The love for each other of the mother and her son, Paul Morel, is the mainspring of both their lives; it is portrayed tenderly, yet with a truthfulness which slurs nothing even of that friction which is unavoidable between the members of two different generations. ... [This] book [is] one of rare excellence." NEW YORK TIMES, 9/21/1913

"Sons and Lovers is a great novel because it has the ring of something written from deeply felt experience. The past remembered, it conveys more of Lawrence's own knowledge of life than anything else he wrote. His other novels appear somehow artificial beside it." KATE MILLETT, INTRODUCTION TO SONS AND LOVERS, MODERN LIBRARY, 2000

THE BOTTOM LINE: The most autobiographical of Lawrence's novels, and his first masterpiece.

THE MOVIE: 2003, television, starring Sarah Lancashire, James Murray, Rupert Evans, Esther Hall, and Lyndsey Marshal, and directed by Stephen Whittaker; 1981, BBC television miniseries, starring Eileen Atkins, Tom Bell, and Lynn Dearth, and directed by Stuart Burge; 1960 (multiple Academy Award nominations), starring Trevor Howard, Dean Stockwell, Wendy Hiller, Mary Ure, William Lucas, and Donald Pleasence, and directed by Jack Cardiff.

The Rainbow (1915)

* #48 MODERN LIBRARY'S 100 BEST NOVELS

Lawrence's fourth novel depicts England's transition from an agricultural to an industrial society and the transformation of women's roles. Considered an experiment in modern psychological realism, the novel was banned in 1915 for its frank discussions of sexual desire and relations, as well as its unpatriotic spirit. Considered subversive, Lawrence had difficulty publishing his new works.

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THE STORY: The Brangwens have farmed the English Midlands for generations. Against rising industrialization and the decline of rural life, three generations of the family experience new sexual dynamics, social rebellions, power struggles, and forms of love. Tom Brangwen, a man of the earth, marries a Polish widow, Lydia; Lydia's daughter and Tom's nephew fall in love and marry. Their large family includes Ursula, a teacher with modern sensibilities and an individual spirit, who braves intense relationships and conflicts before finding happiness.

"Certainly The Rainbow was a bad book, for it was an ill-written book, a book of hatred and desire." WALTER LIONEL GEORGE, LITERARY CHAPTERS, 1918

"It would be a serious loss for English letters at this period if Lawrence were to give up writing novels, for more than any of his contemporaries he had a definite and recognizable genius." THE BOOKMAN [LONDON], 3/19-8/19

"What has astonished me this time round, now I'm in mellower middle age ... is the iconoclastic modernity of the novel. ... Moral schemes and emotional consistency were things Lawrence feared, seeing life as a Hegelian conflict of opposites--not just of creation and destruction, or of the self and the other, but also of man and woman, as different as sunlight and moonlight." ADAM THORPE, GUARDIAN UNLIMITED, 12/13/03

THE BOTTOM LINE: One of Lawrence's finest novels--revolutionary for its depiction of power plays and sexual dynamics.

THE MOVIE: 1989, starring Sammi Davis, Paul McGann, Amanda Donohoe, and Christopher Gable, and directed by Ken Russell.

Women in Love (1920)

* #49 MODERN LIBRARY'S 100 BEST NOVELS

World War I looms symbolically over this sequel to The Rainbow, which Lawrence completed in 1916. Considered a key text of European modernism, the novel had a limited run because of The Rainbow's scandalous nature. While it explores the effect of industrialization on sex, marriage, friendship, and the human psyche, it also caused critical confusion over its homoerotic themes, antiwar stance, and the idea that only passion can rectify an inhumane, alienated society. Lawrence perhaps presented himself as the character of Rupert and his wife as Ursula.

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THE STORY: In a small coal-mining town in the English Midlands in the 1910s, two sisters fall in love. Ursula, a teacher, falls for misanthropic, intellectual school inspector Rupert Birkin, though they clash over the ideal of passion and love; the artistic Gudrun finds herself attracted to Rupert's friend Gerard Crich, an industrialist suffering guilt over his siblings' accidental deaths. While Ursula and Rupert happily marry--despite Rupert's desire for union with another man--Gudrun and Gerard experience the turbulence of an increasingly violent, depraved world.

"It is full of absurdities; but Mr. Lawrence, although he may occasionally repel by egotism, has at least the courage which leads him to risk absurdity for the sake of what he holds to be the truth. ... And yet at its best Women in Love is in a class apart from other novels. ... Mr. Lawrence has this in advance of his contemporaries: that while so many of them improvise he can imagine. It is a great gift, and one to be jealously and finely used." F. S., GUARDIAN, 7/15/21

"Two violent love affairs are the plot's focus, but the drama of the novel has clearly to do with every sort of emotion, and with every sort of spiritual inanition. ... The perversity of the novel is such that its great subject of mankind's tragically split nature is demonstrated in the artwork itself, which is sometimes a fairly conventional novel with a forward-moving plot, sometimes a gorgeous, even outrageous prose poem." JOYCE CAROL OATES, "LAWRENCE'S GOTTERDAMMERUNG: THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF WOMEN IN LOVE," CRITICAL INQUIRY, SPRING 1978

THE BOTTOM LINE: Lawrence considered this challenging modern meditation on love his masterpiece; so do most critics.

THE MOVIE: 1969, starring Glenda Jackson (Academy Award for Best Actress), Jennie Linden, Alan Bates, and Oliver Reed, and directed by Ken Russell.

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

Lawrence, who was suffering from tuberculosis at the time, chose to publish this sexually explicit, controversial novel privately rather than accepting the heavy editing required for a trade edition. Banned as pornographic, it was finally published in an unexpurgated text in the United States in 1959 and in Great Britain in 1960, after a short obscenity trial that attracted many well-known writers, including E. M. Forster, to the defense. (The verdict: not guilty.) Within a year, the novel had sold over 2 million copies.

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THE STORY: In 1917 Constance (Connie) Reid marries Sir Clifford Chatterley, an aristocratic mine owner in Derbeyshire. When a war wound leaves him impotent and paralyzed, Clifford becomes a successful writer while Connie embarks on an unsatisfying affair with a playwright. She then finds herself drawn to the aloof estate gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. A passionate affair brings them together despite their class differences. Connie becomes pregnant, Oliver's former wife returns, and Clifford refuses to grant a divorce--but hope for Connie's and Oliver's reunion endures.

"All serious writers in the English-speaking countries are much in Lawrence's debt, for even the limited circulation of Lady Chatterley's Lover cannot fail to make it easier in future to disregard the ridiculous taboo that the nineteenth century imposed on sex." EDMUND WILSON, "SIGNS OF LIFE: LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER," 1929

"Some of his fantasies, as exposed in Lady Chatterley's Lover, were those of a romantic boy. ... Rereading this novel many years and some loves later, the great sex scenes have lost their power. ... Lady Chatterley's Lover is still at large in the world, still potent and persuasive, and in the hands of young women in countries where they know they may be killed for love." DORIS LESSING, GUARDIAN, 7/15/06

THE BOTTOM LINE: Lawrence's best-known novel and, during its time and ours, a scandalous portrait of carnal love.

THE MOVIE: 2006 (French; based on John Thomas and Lady Jane, Lawrence's second version of the novel), starring Marina Hands (Cesar Award for Best Actress), Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, and Hippolyte Girardot, and directed by Pascale Ferran; 1993, television, starring Joely Richardson, Sean Bean, and James Wilby, and directed by Ken Russell.

RELATED ARTICLE: Where to Start

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, Lawrence's most scandalous novel, shocked the public with its explicit portrayal of sexual desire. SONS AND LOVERS, his first great work, is semiautobiographical in its portrayal of a son's all-consuming love for his mother. WOMEN IN LOVE, considered his finest novel and a key text of European modernism, presents Lawrence's theories on sex, love, and the human psyche.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Scandalous Text of Lady Chatterley's Lover

The prosecuting attorney in the British trial of the novel condemned the following passage, though many others contained words thought to be obscene:

It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.

Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvelous death.

RELATED ARTICLE: LAWRENCE'S SELECTED OTHER WORKS

* Discussed in Major Works

FICTION

THE WHITE PEACOCK (1911)

Lawrence set his first novel in the region of his childhood; narrated in the first person, it introduces some of his trademark themes, including friendship, marriage, and industrialization.

THE TRESPASSER (1912)

Lawrence's second novel addresses the tragic consequences of adultery.

* SONS AND LOVERS (1913)

THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER AND OTHER STORIES (1914)

Lawrence's first short story collection considers sex, relationships, and industrial society in stories such as "The Prussian Officer," "The Thorn in the Flesh," "Daughters of the Vicar," and "Odor of Chrysanthemums."

* THE RAINBOW (1915)

* WOMEN IN LOVE (1920)

THE LOST GIRL (1920)

* JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE

A young woman from a middle-class Midlands family flees with an Italian vaudeville performer to Italy, where she discovers brief social and sexual freedom.

AARON'S ROD (CENSORED, 1922)

Flautist Aaron Sisson leaves his wife, children, and mining community for a life of freedom, adventure, and male friendship in post-war London and Florence.

KANGAROO (1923)

In this semiautobiographical novel, Lawrence fictionalizes his and his wife's three-month visit to Australia and the persecution they experienced during the war.

THE PLUMED SERPENT (1926)

After the Mexican Revolution, a European woman leaves her husband for a pagan adventure in Mexico.

* LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER (1928)

THE ESCAPED COCK (1929, LIMITED EDITION) (THE MAN WHO DIED, 1931)

This short novel ponders ideas about death, resurrection, and sensuality.

THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY (1930)

In this novella, two sisters feel oppressed when they return to their family's vicarage in post-war East Midlands.

LOVE AMONG THE HAYSTACKS AND OTHER STORIES (1930)

This volume contains all of the stories not in The Prussian Officer collection--from Lawrence's first ("A Prelude") to some of his last, including "New Eve and Old Adam."

NONFICTION

TWILIGHT IN ITALY AND OTHER ESSAYS (1916)

Intended for newspapers, these travel articles record Lawrence's experiences and anxieties during the prewar era.

SEA AND SARDINIA (1921)

Lawrence and Frieda visited Sardinia in 1921; this travelogue offers insight into both the island's culture and the author's emotional state.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS AND FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS (1921-1922)

In response to the criticism of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence penned two essays on his counter-Freudian theories about children, incest, marriage, and society.

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE (1923)

Essays on James Fenimore Cooper, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and others.

REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF A PORCUPINE AND OTHER ESSAYS (1925)

Philosophical essays on religion, education, nature, and individuality.

APOCALYPSE AND THE WRITINGS ON REVELATION (1931)

Lawrence's last book, written as he was dying, criticizes human civilization while exploring primitive symbolism and paganism.

ETRUSCAN PLACES (PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY, 1932) (SKETCHES OF ETRUSCAN PLACES AND OTHER ITALIAN ESSAYS, 2001)

Essays on the joyful Etruscan civilization.

RELATED ARTICLE: Painting the Erotic

Though he lacked formal art training, D. H. Lawrence became nearly as infamous a painter as he was a novelist. Admiring the Impressionist paintings of Renoir and Cezanne and inspired by William Blake, Lawrence started to paint in oil in the mid-1920s. Drawing on Renaissance artists' themes, which he believed revered sexuality without degenerating into pornography, Lawrence portrayed erotic moments and visions. Boccaccio Story, Leda and the Swan, and other works revealed his awe for the naked human body.

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Lawrence's debut exhibition at London's Warren Gallery in June 1929 attracted thousands of visitors--and harsh criticism from the press; The Observer, for one, called it "frankly disgusting." On July 5, Scotland Yard confiscated 13 of the paintings on charges of obscenity. After sitting in a cell, they were returned to Lawrence on the condition that they would never again be publicly displayed in Britain. (Today, collections in Texas and New Mexico house the works.)

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Some contemporary art critics, citing his undefined women and awkward torsos, suggest that Lawrence lacked real talent. If Lawrence was no Renoir or Blake, his paintings nonetheless touched off a cultural debate that culminated in the 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. In the end, Lawrence's exhibition perhaps proved a point as much to himself as to society: that depictions of nudity and eroticism, whether in literature or art, would, critic Jonathan Jones writes, "shake society to its foundations." Lawrence was "the priest of love, but perhaps it is in his paintings, intentionally or otherwise, that he comes closest to straightforward profanity. Here, at last, are the dirty bits" ("A Life in Pictures," Guardian, 11/8/02).

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For facsimiles of the Warren Gallery paintings, see The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence (1929).