D. H. Lawrence

Chapter 1 · Eastwood

A miner, a schoolteacher, and a marriage that went wrong

1885 – 1908 · Eastwood · Nottingham · Croydon

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, a Nottinghamshire colliery village, the fourth child of Arthur Lawrence, a face worker at Brinsley pit, and Lydia Beardsall, a former schoolteacher.

The central fact of the household was that his mother believed she had married beneath herself and did not conceal it. She spoke standard English; his father spoke broad Nottinghamshire dialect. She wanted her sons out of the pit and pushed them relentlessly toward respectability. Lawrence took her side entirely as a boy and spent much of his adult life reconsidering it — coming, by the end, to think his father had been the more vital of the two and that his mother's refinement had been a kind of slow violence.

He was a sickly child, won a scholarship to Nottingham High School, worked as a clerk at a surgical-appliance factory, and took a teaching certificate. In 1908 he went to Croydon as an elementary schoolmaster at ninety pounds a year, and wrote in the evenings.

His mother died of cancer in December 1910. Lawrence, by his own admission in a letter, gave her an overdose of morphine to end it. He was twenty-five. He wrote afterwards that they had been like one thing, and that he had been unable to feel properly for two years.

Why this matters

Lawrence is the first major English novelist to write about a working-class industrial childhood from inside it, and the class tension in his home is the engine of his early work.

You have Eastwood and the marriage at the centre of it. What would you ask him?

Ask Lawrence

• “What did your mother's ambition do to your father?”
• “You took her side as a boy — when did that change?”
• “What was it like to speak one language at home and another at school?”
• “Why did you write about the pit rather than escape it entirely?”
• “How long did it take to be able to feel anything after 1910?”

Chapter 2 · Sons and Lovers

Writing the household down

1910 – 1913 · Croydon · Nottinghamshire · Italy

*Sons and Lovers*, published in 1913, is the novel in which Lawrence wrote his own family. Paul Morel is a miner's son with an educated mother who has transferred her ambitions to him, and the book follows what that does to his ability to love anybody else.

It went through several drafts under different titles. The published version owes a good deal to Edward Garnett, the reader at Duckworth, who cut roughly a tenth of the manuscript — mostly tightening the early chapters. Lawrence accepted the cuts at the time and later resented them; modern scholarly editions restore the fuller text, and readers can compare.

The novel did two things English fiction had not managed. It described industrial working-class life without either pity or picturesque distance — the wages coming home, the pit dirt, the way a household actually argues — and it described sexual and emotional life with a directness that made reviewers uneasy even before the prosecutions began.

It also, crucially, does not resolve. Paul does not escape and is not destroyed; the book ends with him walking toward the town lights, undecided. Lawrence was writing out of a wound that had not closed, and he did not close it for the reader either.

It sold modestly and established him. He was twenty-seven, and he never taught school again.

Why this matters

Sons and Lovers brought working-class industrial life into serious English fiction as a subject in its own right, not as background or as social problem.

You have the novel made out of his own household. What is your question?

Ask Lawrence

• “Was it fair to your family to write Sons and Lovers?”
• “What did Garnett cut, and were you right to be angry later?”
• “Why does the novel refuse to settle Paul's future?”
• “What had English fiction been getting wrong about working-class life?”
• “Is Paul Morel you, or a version of you you were arguing with?”

Chapter 3 · Frieda

A professor's wife, three children, and six weeks

1912 – 1914 · Nottingham · Metz · Bavaria · Italy

In March 1912 Lawrence called on Ernest Weekley, his former professor of modern languages at Nottingham, to ask about work in Germany. He met Weekley's wife, Frieda von Richthofen — German, aristocratic, six years older, mother of three children under ten. Within about six weeks they had left England together.

Frieda did not take the children, and Weekley refused her access to them for years. This is the part that is usually rushed past. She wrote to them, was not permitted to see them, and waited outside their schools. The cost of the elopement was paid mostly by three children who had not chosen it. Lawrence knew this and it appears, transformed, throughout his fiction.

They walked across the Alps into Italy, living on almost nothing. Weekley obtained his divorce, and they married in July 1914.

Frieda was not a passive companion. She was intellectually formidable, had been influenced by the psychoanalytic circles of Munich, and argued with him constantly and physically; friends described scenes that were alarming to watch. She is in the novels — most visibly as Ursula in *Women in Love* — and the arguments in his fiction between a man and a woman who cannot leave each other alone are drawn from a marriage that ran that way for eighteen years.

Why this matters

The elopement is the pivot of Lawrence's life and work, and it cannot be told honestly without the three children who paid for it.

You have the six weeks and everything they cost. What would you ask him?

Ask Lawrence

• “What happened to Frieda's three children after you left?”
• “Was six weeks long enough to know?”
• “What did Frieda give you intellectually that you did not have?”
• “Friends found your marriage frightening to be near — was that necessary?”
• “How much of Women in Love is an argument you were actually having?”

Chapter 4 · Suppressed, Watched, Expelled

The Rainbow, Cornwall, and the savage pilgrimage

1915 – 1922 · Cornwall · London · Ceylon · Australia

*The Rainbow* was published in September 1915 and prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act in November. The magistrate ordered the seized copies destroyed. Lawrence's publisher did not contest the case seriously, and Lawrence was left with no income and a reputation as a pornographer.

He and Frieda moved to Zennor in Cornwall, where they lived cheaply near the sea. Frieda was German, her cousin was Manfred von Richthofen, and the coast was under naval watch. Locals reported them; their cottage was searched; they were accused of signalling to submarines. In October 1917 they were served with an order under the Defence of the Realm Act expelling them from Cornwall within three days and requiring them to report to police wherever they went.

Lawrence had also been called three times for medical examination for military service and rejected each time — tuberculous, though he would not use the word.

After the war they left England and mostly stayed away: Italy, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico. Frieda's friend Catherine Carswell called it a savage pilgrimage. He wrote about England relentlessly from a distance, and the anger in the later work is the anger of a man who had been told by his own country that he was not wanted.

Why this matters

State suppression of Lawrence's fiction was not an abstract literary matter: it destroyed his income, drove him abroad, and shaped everything he wrote afterwards.

You have the destroyed book and the expulsion order. What would you put to him?

Ask Lawrence

• “Was the prosecution of The Rainbow about obscenity, or about something else?”
• “What was it like to be searched and expelled from Cornwall?”
• “Why did you refuse to name the tuberculosis?”
• “You wrote about England constantly from abroad — why not come back?”
• “What did losing your readers to a court order do to how you wrote?”

Chapter 5 · What Was Cut Out of Piano

A poem that argues with its own feeling

1913 – 1930 · Taormina · New Mexico · Vence

*Piano* is a short, early poem and the best available lesson in revision in English. A man hears a woman singing in the evening and is carried back, against his will, to sitting under the piano as a child while his mother played. It ends with the grown man weeping like a child for the past.

An earlier and much longer draft survives. It is far more openly sentimental: it lingers, explains, and invites the reader to wallow. The published poem is what remains after Lawrence cut it back. And the effect of the cutting is that the poem now resists its own emotion while having it — the speaker calls the singer's song *insidious*, says the *glamour* of childhood is *upon* him as though it were an infection, and describes his manhood as *cast down*. He does not approve of what is happening to him. He cannot stop it either.

That is why the poem is set: put the two drafts side by side and a student can see, in an afternoon, the difference between having a feeling and writing one.

Lawrence wrote *Snake* and the rest of *Birds, Beasts and Flowers* in Taormina in Sicily in the early twenties. *Lady Chatterley's Lover* was printed privately in Florence in 1928 and banned in Britain until the Penguin trial of 1960, thirty years after his death. He died at Vence, in the south of France, on 2 March 1930, aged forty-four.

“The glamour of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast down.”

— D. H. Lawrence, 'Piano', Collected Poems

Why this matters

Piano demonstrates that the enemy of feeling in writing is not restraint but sentimentality — and it does so by leaving the evidence of the cut in the finished poem.

You have the two drafts and the cut between them. What would you ask?

Ask Lawrence

• “What exactly did you cut out of the earlier draft of Piano?”
• “Is Piano sentimental, or is it a poem about sentimentality?”
• “Why call the singing 'insidious'?”
• “What do you mean by the blood knowing something the head does not?”
• “Lady Chatterley was banned for thirty years after your death — what would you say at that trial?”

What Lawrence changed

Lawrence brought working-class industrial England into serious fiction and wrote about the body in a way that got his books destroyed by court order and read anyway. The 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, thirty years after his death, effectively ended literary censorship in Britain. Piano remains on syllabuses because both its drafts survive, letting a student watch a writer decide how much feeling a poem can carry before it collapses.

A debate that continues

Lawrence's treatment of women, his views on instinct and leadership, and the authoritarian strain in his middle-period writing are all seriously contested, and his critical standing has fallen and risen more than once since 1930.

Keep exploring — ask Lawrence

• “Which of your novels should be read first, and why that one?”
• “What did industry take from England that has not been given back?”
• “Was leaving England the making of you or the loss of you?”

Related lives

• George Orwell — Chronicler of the Total State
• Virginia Woolf — Voice of the Inner Life
• John Keats — Who Could Stay In The Uncertainty
• Vernon Scannell — Who Found The Violence In A Garden Game

Related themes

Censorship and literature · Class in English writing · Revision and drafting