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D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, the product of an unhappy marriage between a coal-miner father and a schoolteacher mother. His birthplace, Eastwood, was a mining village in Nottinghamshire, the heart of England's industrial midlands. Lawrence became deeply attached to his mother, who was deeply committed to helping her children escape the working class. In was Nottinghamshire that Lawrence developed his hostility towards the mining industry that had dehumanized his father and destroyed the pastoral English countryside of his birthplace, a hostility evident throughout Lady Chatterley's Lover in Lawrence's fulmination against industrialism and modern technology.
Lawrence supported himself by teaching school, although his ambition was to become a poet. In 1909, he published his first poems; in 1911 and 1912, he published his first two novels: The White Peacock and The Trespasser, respectively. In 1912, he left England with Frieda Weekley (née Von Richtofen), the wife of one of his college professors. The two were married in 1914, after the publication of his third novel, the autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913). His elopement marked the beginning of a nomadic lifestyle. Except for a stint in England during World War I, Lawrence spent practically the rest of his life traveling the world, from Germany to New Mexico, in search of a healthy atmosphere in which to rehabilitate his lungs. Lawrence suffered with tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed him in 1930, at the age of 44. Lawrence's elopement also marked the first of his rejections of conventional morality, rejections that would play themselves out in sexual experimentation that almost ruined his marriage, and that informed his later writing, especially Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
In the sixteen years between his marriage and his death, Lawrence was remarkably prolific, publishing many novels, including the novels generally considered his finest: The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920); nonfiction, including history textbooks, travel memoirs and scholarly psychological tracts; and several collections of short stories and poems.
Background for Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In the last years of his life, wracked by tuberculosis, Lawrence wrote three very different versions of what would prove his final novel, the sexually explicit Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He survived to see the final version attacked by most reviewers and censored in England and America after it was first published in the spring of 1928.
Lawrence was not the only author writing in the decades after World War I whose work was considered radically immoral. Famously, for instance, a furor arose over the publication of James Joyce's great novel Ulysses (1922) years before Lady Chatterley's Lover was written. Many of the Modernist writers and poets who dominated postwar avant-garde literary art placed a high premium on discarding social convention, which they believed had been exposed as empty by the carnage of the war. Society was morally bankrupt, empty of real meaning, composed of individuals between whom no real connection or understanding was possible. In response, artists began to experiment radically with form, and they set a premium on art that was “real,” that eliminated convention to get at the core of life.
But D.H. Lawrence was not really one of these formally and thematically radical Modernists. While he shared the Modernist belief that the postwar world was virtually bereft of meaningful values, Lawrence laid the blame at the doorstep of technology, the class system, and intellectual life. He believed that modern industry had deprived people of individuality—making them cogs in the industrial machine, a machine driven by greed. He further believed that modern intellectual life conspired with social constraint to bleed men dry of their vital, natural vigor. Lawrence wanted to revive in the human consciousness an awareness of savage sensuality—a sensuality which would free men from their dual enslavement to modern industry and intellectual emptiness. Lawrence was in many ways a primitivist. He saw little reason for optimism in modern society, and looked nostalgically backwards towards the days of pastoral, agricultural England.
