🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of D. H. Lawrence

Literature · Novelists

D. H. Lawrence

1885–1930 · English

Modernism

David Herbert Lawrence, a miner's son from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, was a novelist, poet, short-story writer, critic and painter. His fiction explores sexuality, class, industrialisation and instinctive life, and several works were censored for obscenity. Lady Chatterley's Lover became famous when Penguin Books was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1960 for publishing it unexpurgated.

How to spot them

  • ▸Eastwood, Nottinghamshire; a coal miner's son; Paul Morel and his mother in Sons and Lovers
  • ▸The Brangwen sisters Ursula and Gudrun; Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich
  • ▸Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors; the 1960 Penguin trial
  • ▸Eloped with Frieda Weekley, wife of his former professor
  • ▸Wandering exile in Italy, Australia, Mexico and New Mexico; died at Vence

Key works

The White Peacock (1911)

His first novel

Sons and Lovers (1913)

Paul Morel torn between his possessive mother Gertrude and the loves Miriam Leivers and Clara Dawes

The Rainbow (1915)

Three generations of the Brangwen family; prosecuted for obscenity and copies destroyed

Women in Love (1920)

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen with Rupert Birkin and the mine-owner Gerald Crich

Kangaroo (1923)

Novel set in Australia amid shadowy political movements

The Plumed Serpent (1926)

Revival of Aztec religion in Mexico

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

Lady Constance Chatterley's affair with the gamekeeper Mellors; privately printed in Florence

Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923)

Poetry collection including 'Snake'

Key ideas

  • Against mechanised industrial society, he championed instinct, the body and 'blood-consciousness'
  • The R v Penguin Books trial of 1960 tested the new Obscene Publications Act 1959 and became a landmark in ending literary censorship in Britain

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, son of the miner Arthur Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall; trained as a teacher and taught in Croydon
  • •In 1912 eloped to Germany with Frieda Weekley, wife of Professor Ernest Weekley; they married in 1914
  • •Frieda was a distant cousin of the First World War flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron
  • •Suspected of spying, the Lawrences were expelled from Cornwall in 1917
  • •Prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones asked the 1960 jury whether Lady Chatterley's Lover was a book 'you would even wish your wife or your servants to read'
  • •Hermione Roddice in Women in Love is based on Lady Ottoline Morrell
  • •His paintings were seized by police from a London gallery exhibition in 1929
  • •Short stories include 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' and 'The Rocking-Horse Winner'; he died of tuberculosis at Vence in 1930

Drill it — 9 cards

1 / 9new card

Sources