A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
|
|||
|
Date
and Place of birth: |
|||
|
Life and Works: English novelist, story writer, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature, most famous for his novels Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928). Lawrence saw sex and intuition as ways to undistorted perception of reality and means to respond to the inhumanity of the industrial culture. Lawrence's novels are known for Oedipal anxieties and sometimes explicit descriptions of sexual relationships, a rarity in literature at the time and shocking to his contemporaries. He took as his major theme the relationship between men and women, which he regarded as disastrously wrong in his time. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "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. Lawrence is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists object to the attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works. David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September, 1885, in the mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in central England. His birthplace, in Eastwood, 8a Victoria Street, is now a museum. He was the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a struggling coal miner who was a heavy drinker. His mother, Lydia, née Beardsall, was a former schoolteacher, whose family had fallen in hard times. However, she was greatly superior in education to her husband. Lawrence was a sickly child, devoted to his refined but domineering mother, who insisted upon his education. Lawrence's childhood was dominated by poverty and friction between his parents. His working class background and the tensions between his parents provided the raw material for a number of his early works. Lawrence would return to this locality, which he was to call "the country of my heart," as a setting for much of his fiction. Encouraged by his mother, with whom he had a deep emotional bond and who figures as Mrs Morel in his first masterpiece, Lawrence became interested in arts. The young Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School (now renamed Greasley Beauvale D. H. Lawrence Infant School in his honor) from 1891 until 1898, becoming the first local pupil to win a County Council scholarship to Nottingham 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. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence received his teaching certificate at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career at Davidson Road School in Croydon in South London (1908-1911). In 1909 a number of Lawrence's poems were submitted by Jessie Chambers, his childhood sweetheart, to Ford Madox Ford, who published them in English Review. While in Nottingham, Lawrence had regularly vivited the Chambers family at Haggs Farm, and started his friendship with Jessie. Shortly after the final proofs of his first published novel The White Peacock appeared in 1911, Lawrence's mother died- he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine. This scene was re-created in his novel Sons and Lovers (1912). She had been ill with cancer. The young man was devastated and he was to describe the next few months as his "sick year." In 1911 Lawrence was introduced to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader, who acted as a mentor, provided further encouragement, and became a valued friend, as Garnett's son David was also. Throughout these months the young author revised Paul Morel, the first draft of what became 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. He also broke off an engagement to Louie Burrows, an old friend from his days in Nottingham and Eastwood. The same year he started an affair with Alice Dax, the wife of a chemist. In 1912 he met Frieda von Richthofen, the professor Ernest Weekly's wife and fell in love with her. She was six years older than her new lover and had three young children. Frieda left her husband and children, and they eloped to Bavaria and then continued to Austria, Germany and Italy. Lawrence's constant struggle for a right relationship with women came to a climax in his encounter, liaison, and marriage with Frieda. In 1912 Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers. It was based on his childhood and critics immediately regarded it as a brilliant illustration of Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. The couple returned to England at the outbreak of World War I and were married on 13 July 1914. Lawrence's fourth novel, The Rainbow (1915), was about two sisters growing up in the north of England. The character of Ursula Brangwem was partly based on Lawrence's teacher associate in Nottingham, Loui Burrows. She was Lawrence's first love. The novel was banned for its alleged obscenity - it used swear words and talked openly about sex. Lawrence's frankness in describing sexual relations between men and women upset a great many people and over 1000 copies of the novel were burned by the examining magistrate's order. The banning created further difficulties for him in getting anything published. Also his paintings were confiscated from an art gallery. Weekley'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. They were even accused of spying and signaling to German submarines off of the coast of Cornwall where they lived at Zennor and officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917. The Lawrences were not permitted to emigrate until 1919, when their years of wandering began. Lawrence started to write The Lost Girl (1920) in Italy. He had settled with Frieda in Gargano. In those days they were so poor that they could not afford even a newspaper. The novel dealt with one of Lawrence's favorite subjects - a girl marries a man of a much lower social status, against the advice of friends, and finds compensation in his superior warmth and understanding. Lawrence dropped the novel for some years and rewrote the story in an old Sicilian farm-house near Taormina in 1920. In the 1920s Aldous Huxley traveled with Lawrence in Italy and France. Between 1922 and 1926 he and Frieda left Italy to live intermittently in Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. These years provided settings for several of Lawrence's novels and stories. In 1924 they encountered Mabel Dodge Luhan, a prominent socialite, and considered establishing a utopian community on what was then known as the 160-acre (0.65 km2) Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico. They acquired the property, now called the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, in 1924 in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. He stayed in New Mexico for two years, with extended visits to Lake Chapala and Oaxaca in Mexico. After severe illness in Mexico - Lawrence contracted malaria - it was discovered that he was suffering from life-threatening tuberculosis. From 1925 the Lawrences confined their travels to Europe. The Lawrences made their home in a villa in Northern Italy, living near to Florence while he wrote The Virgin and the Gipsy and the various versions of Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928). With artist Earl Brewster, Lawrence visited 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 Etruscan Places, a beautiful book that contrasts the lively past with Mussolini's fascism. Lawrence's best known work is Lady Chatterly's Lover, first published privately in Florence in 1928. It tells of the love affair between a wealthy, married woman, Constance Chatterley, and a man who works on her husband's estate. A war wound has left her husband, Sir Clifford, a mine owner in Derbyshire, impotent and paralyzed. Constance has a brief affair with a young playwright and then enters into a passionate relationship with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Oliver Melloers. Connie becomes pregnant. Sir Clifford refuses to give a divorce and the lovers wait for better time when they could be united. Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned for a time in both the UK and the US as pornographic. In the UK it was published in unexpurgated form in 1960 after an obscenity trial, where defense witnesses included E.M. Forster, Helen Gardner, and Richard Hoggart. Among Lawrence's other famous novels is Women in Love (1920), a sequel to The Rainbow. The characters are probably partially based on Lawrence and his wife, and John Middleton Murray and his wife Katherine Mansfield. The friends shared a house in England in 1914-15. While writing Women in Love in Cornwall during 1916-17, Lawrence developed a strong and possibly romantic relationship with a Cornish farmer named William Henry Hocking. Although it is not absolutely clear if their relationship was sexual, Frieda Weekley said she believed it was. Lawrence's fascination with themes of homosexuality could also be related to his own sexual orientation. This theme is also overtly manifested in Women in Love. Lawrence argued that instincts and intuitions are more important than the reason. His belief in the importance of instincts reflected the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Lawrence had read already in the 1910s. Aaron's Road (1922) shows directly the influence of the German philosopher, and in Kangaroo (1923) Lawrence expressed his own idea of a 'superman'. The Plumed Serpent (1926) was a vivid evocation of Mexico and its ancient Aztec religion. Lawrence's last major work of fiction, The Man Who Died (1929), originally entitled The Escaped Cock, was published in two parts, the first in 1928 and the second in 1929. The bold story of Christ's life following his resurrection, was written in a New Testament pastiche language. Instead of going to heaven, Christ initiates himself into the fully human world, and becomes seduced by the perfume of the priestess of Isis. All of Lawrence's novels are written in a lyrical, sensuous, often rhapsodic prose style. He had an extraordinary ability to convey a sense of specific time and place, and his writings often reflected his complex personality. Lawrence's non-fiction works include Movements in European History (1921), Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1922), Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) and Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation (1931). Lawrence used all of the literary forms successfully, except perhaps for drama (there are a few early plays not much read or produced and David, 1926, from his latter years in the United States). He wrote strikingly good short stories all through his career. Early ones are "Odour of Chrysanthemums," "Daughters of the Vicar," "Love among the Haystacks," "The Prussian Officer," "Tickets, Please," and "The Horse-dealer's Daughter." Others, of middle and late period, are "The Border Line," "The Woman Who Rode Away," "Glad Ghosts," "The Rocking Horse Winner," "Two Blue Birds," "The Man Who Loved Islands," and "Things." Lawrence's poetry ranges from early rhymed poems in Love Poems and Others (1913) and Amores (1925), through the freer forms of Look! We Have Come Through! and the highly experimental and free forms of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, through the deliberately doggerel satire of much of Pansies (1929) and Nettles (1930), to the less colloquial and at times classical diction and rhythm of Last Poems (1932), gathered from his manuscripts and published posthumously. In criticism Lawrence achieved a book that is still regarded as one containing important, challenging insights, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and a number of essays on the novel that have provided themes for later critics, particularly his distinction between an author's conscious intentions and what the novel may actually be saying. Among "travel" books his Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Places (1932) are of interest. The short journalistic pieces collected in his Assorted Articles (1930) are witty and challenging. Some of his essays did not appear in book form until the appearance of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (1936), edited by Edward McDonald, who also issued two bibliographies of Lawrence's work during the author's lifetime. 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. D.H. Lawrence died at Villa Robermond, in Vence, France on March 2, 1930 of tuberculosis, a disease with which he had struggled for years. Frieda (d. 1956) moved to the Kiowa Ranch and built a small memorial chapel to Lawrence; his ashes lie there. In 1950 she married Angelino Ravagli, a former Italian infantry officer, with whom she had started an affair in 1925. |
|
||
|
Selected works:
Bibliography about D.H. Lawrence:
|
|||
|
|||
Download here our book search engines