D. H. Lawrence

Who Trusted The Blood Over The Head · Novelist & Poet · 1885–1930

The miner's son whose novels were suppressed for obscenity, and who cut a sentimental poem back until it became Piano.

Who was Lawrence?

D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth child of a coal miner and a former schoolteacher who had married beneath what she considered herself and did not let anybody forget it. He was a scholarship boy, then an elementary schoolmaster at Croydon, and then a writer: Sons and Lovers in 1913, The Rainbow suppressed for obscenity in 1915, Women in Love, and the poems collected as Birds, Beasts and Flowers. In 1912 he left England with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of his former professor and the mother of three young children; they married in 1914 and were watched, searched and expelled from Cornwall during the war as a suspect pair. Piano is an early poem and a case study in revision: an earlier and much longer draft is far more openly sentimental, and what survives is the version Lawrence cut back — a man hearing a woman sing in the evening, taken back to sitting under the piano as a child, ending with the grown man weeping like a child for the past. The cutting is the interesting part, because the finished poem argues with its own feeling while having it. He had tuberculosis and refused the word for it. He wrote about England constantly and from a distance, dying at Vence in the south of France in 1930, aged forty-four.

Major achievements

• Sons and Lovers (1913), the mining-village novel that made his name
• The Rainbow and Women in Love
• Piano, and the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers
• Brought working-class English life into serious fiction without apology
• Wrote about the body in a way that got his books banned and read anyway

Life in brief

• 1885 — Born in Eastwood: Fourth child of a miner and a former schoolteacher.
• 1908 — Schoolmaster at Croydon: Teaching while writing the first novel.
• 1912 — Leaves England with Frieda: The German wife of his former professor.
• 1913 — Sons and Lovers: The mining-village novel that made his name.
• 1915 — The Rainbow suppressed: Prosecuted for obscenity; the copies destroyed.
• 1917 — Expelled from Cornwall: Watched and searched as a suspect pair during the war.
• 1923 — Birds, Beasts and Flowers: The poems of the years abroad.
• 1930 — Dies at Vence: Of tuberculosis, aged forty-four.

Explore the life of Lawrence — five chapters

1. Eastwood — A miner, a schoolteacher, and a marriage that went wrong
2. Sons and Lovers — Writing the household down
3. Frieda — A professor's wife, three children, and six weeks
4. Suppressed, Watched, Expelled — The Rainbow, Cornwall, and the savage pilgrimage
5. What Was Cut Out of Piano — A poem that argues with its own feeling

Read the five-chapter life of D. H. Lawrence →

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