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David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, with his output spanning novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. These works, taken together, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour.
Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies, and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and the misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in voluntary exile, self defined as a "savage pilgrimage."[1] 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."[2] 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. He is now valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists have questioned the attitudes to women and sexuality found in his works.
Life
Early life (1885-1912)
The fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner, and Lydia, née Beardsall, a former schoolmistress, David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born and spent his formative years in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom. His birthplace, in Eastwood, 8a Victoria Street, is now a museum. His working class background and the tensions between his mismatched parents provided the raw material for a number of his early works and Lawrence would return to this locality, which he was to call "the country of my heart".",[3] as a setting for much of his fiction.
The young Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School 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. He went on to become a full-time student and received a teaching certificate from University College Nottingham in 1908. During these early years he was working on his first poems, some short stories, and a draft of a novel, Laetitia, that was eventually to become The White Peacock. At the end of 1907 he won a short story competition in the Nottingham Guardian, the first time that he had gained any wider recognition for his literary talents.
In the autumn of 1908 the newly qualified Lawrence left his childhood home for London. Whilst teaching in Davidson Road School, Croydon he continued writing. Some of the early poetry, submitted by Jessie Chambers, came to the attention of Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of the influential The English Review. Hueffer then commissioned the story Odour of Chrysanthemums which, when published in that magazine, encouraged Heinemann, a London publisher, to ask Lawrence for more work. His career as a professional author now began in earnest, although he taught for a further year. Shortly after the final proofs of his first published novel The White Peacock appeared in 1910, Lawrence's mother died. She had been ill with cancer. The young man was devastated and he was to describe the next few months as "his sick year". It is clear that Lawrence had an extremely close relationship with his mother and his grief following her death became a major turning-point in his life, just as the death of Mrs. Morel forms a major turning-point in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, a work that often faithfully records much of the writer's experience of his provincial upbringing.
During 1911 Lawrence was introduced to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader, who acted as a mentor, provided further encouragement, and became a valued friend. Throughout these months the young author revised Paul Morel, the first sketch of what was to become 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.
Blithe spirits (1912-1914)
In March 1912 the author met the free spirited woman with whom he was to share the rest of his life. She was six years older than her new lover, married and with three young children. Frieda Weekley née von Richthofen was then the wife of Lawrence's former modern languages professor from Nottingham University, Ernest Weekley. Frieda was bored with her marriage and she had already had brief affairs with other lovers, including Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud. She now eloped with Lawrence to her parent's home in Metz, a garrison town in Germany near the disputed border with France. Their stay here included Lawrence's first brush with militarism when he was arrested and accused of being a British spy, before being released following an intervention from Frieda's father. After this encounter Lawrence left for a small hamlet to the south of Munich where he was joined by Frieda for their 'honeymoon', later memorialised in the series of love poems entitled Look! We Have Come Through (1917).
From Germany they walked southwards across the Alps to Italy, a journey that was recorded in the first of his brilliant travel books, a collection of linked essays entitled Twilight in Italy and the unfinished novel, Mr Noon. During his stay in Italy, Lawrence completed the final version of Sons and Lovers that, when published in 1913, was acknowledged to represent a vivid portrait of the realities of working class provincial life. The couple returned to England in 1913 for a short visit. Lawrence now encountered and befriended John Middleton Murry, the critic, and the short story writer from New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield. Lawrence and Frieda soon went back to Italy, staying in a cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia. Here he started writing the first draft of a work of fiction that was to be transformed into two of his finest novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. Eventually Frieda obtained her divorce. The couple returned to England at the outbreak of World War I and were married on the 13 July 1914.
The nightmare (1914-1919)
Frieda'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. The Rainbow (1915) was suppressed after an investigation into its alleged obscenity in 1915. Later, they were even accused of spying and signalling to German submarines off of the coast of Cornwall where they lived at Zennor. During this period he finished a sequel to The Rainbow, that many regard as his masterpiece. This radical new work, Women in Love, is a key text of European modernism. In it Lawrence explores the destructive features of contemporary civilization through the evolving relationships of four major characters as they reflect upon the value of the arts, politics, economics, sexual experience, friendship and marriage. This book is a bleak, bitter vision of humanity and proved impossible to publish in wartime conditions. It is now widely recognised as an English novel of great dramatic force and intellectual subtlety.
In late 1917, after constant harassment by the military authorities, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall at three days' notice under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This persecution was later described in an autobiographical chapter of his Australian novel, Kangaroo, published in 1923. In 1918, he lived in the small, beautiful rural village of Hermitage near Newbury in Berkshire. Until 1919 he was compelled by poverty to shift from address to address and barely survived a severe attack of influenza.
The savage pilgrimage begins (1919-1922)
After the traumatic experience of the war years, Lawrence began what he termed his 'savage pilgrimage', a time of voluntary exile. He escaped from England at the earliest practical opportunity, to return only twice for brief visits, and with Frieda spent the remainder of his life travelling; settling down for only short periods. This wanderlust took him to Italy, Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), Australia, North America, Mexico and after returning once more in Italy, southern France.
Lawrence abandoned England in November 1919 and headed south; first to the Abruzzi district in central Italy and then onwards to Capri and the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, Sicily. From Sicily he made brief excursions to Sardinia, Monte Cassino, Malta, Northern Italy, Austria and Southern Germany. Many of these places appeared in his writings. New novels included The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod and the fragment entitled Mr Noon (the first part of which was published in the Phoenix anthology of his works, and the entirety in 1984). He experimented with shorter novels or novellas, such as The Captain's Doll, The Fox and The Ladybird. In addition, some of his short stories were issued in the collection England, My England and Other Stories. During these years he produced a number of poems about the natural world in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Lawrence is widely recognised as one of the finest travel writers in the English language and Sea and Sardinia, a book that describes a brief journey from Taormina undertaken in January 1921, is a vivid recreation of the life of the inhabitants of this part of the Mediterranean. Less well known is the brilliant memoir of Maurice Magnus, in which Lawrence recalls his visit to the monastery of Monte Cassino. Other non-fiction books include two studies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Movements in European History, a school textbook that was published under a pseudonym, a reflection of his blighted reputation in England.
Seeking a new world (1922-1925)
In late February 1922 the Lawrences left Europe behind with the intention of migrating to the United States. They sailed in an easterly direction, first to Ceylon and then on to Australia. A short residence in Darlington, Western Australia, which included an encounter with local writer Mollie Skinner, was followed by a brief stop in the small coastal town of Thirroul in New South Wales, during which Lawrence completed Kangaroo, a novel about local fringe politics that also revealed a lot about his wartime experiences in Cornwall.
Resuming their journey, Frieda and Lawrence finally arrived in the USA in September 1922. Here they encountered Mabel Dodge Luhan, a prominent socialite, and considered establishing a utopian community on what was then known as the 160-acre Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and Frieda acquired the property, now called the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, in 1924 in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. By all accounts Lawrence loved this ranch high up in the mountains, the only home that he ever owned. He stayed in New Mexico for two years, with extended visits to Lake Chapala and Oaxaca in Mexico.
Whilst in the New World, Lawrence rewrote and published his Studies in Classic American Literature, a set of critical essays begun in 1917, and later described by Edmund Wilson as " one of the few first-rate books that have ever been written on the subject". These provocative and original interpretations, with their insights into symbolism, New England Transcendentalism and the puritan sensibility, were a significant factor in the revival of the reputation of Herman Melville during the early 1920s. In addition, Lawrence completed a number of new fictional works, including The Boy in the Bush, The Plumed Serpent, St Mawr, The Woman who Rode Away, The Princess and assorted short stories. He also found time to produce some more travel writing, such as the collection of linked excursions that became Mornings in Mexico.
A brief voyage to England at the end of 1923 was a failure and he soon returned to Taos, convinced that his life as an author now lay in America. However, in March 1925 he suffered a near fatal attack of malaria and tuberculosis whilst on a third visit to Mexico. Although he eventually recovered, the diagnosis of his condition obliged him to return once again to Europe. He was dangerously ill and poor health limited the ability to travel for the remainder of his life.
Approaching death (1925-1930)
Lawrence and Frieda set up home in a villa in Northern Italy, living near to Florence whilst he wrote The Virgin and the Gipsy and the various versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). This book, his last major novel, was initially published in private editions in Florence and Paris and reinforced his notoriety. Lawrence responded robustly to those who claimed to be offended, penning a large number of satirical poems, published under the title of "Pansies" and "Nettles", as well as a tract on Pornography and Obscenity.
The return to Italy allowed Lawrence to renew some of his old friendships and during these years he was particularly close to Aldous Huxley, a loyal companion who was to edit the first collection of Lawrence's letters after his death, along with a generous memoir. With another friend, the artist Earl Brewster, Lawrence found the time to visit 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 Sketches of Etruscan Places, a beautiful book that contrasts the lively past with the brutal, bombastic stupidity of Mussolini's fascism. Lawrence continued to produce fiction, including short stories and The Escaped Cock (also published as The Man Who Died), an unorthodox reworking of the Christian belief of the resurrection that affirms the life of the body. 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. Nine of the Lawrence oils have been on permanent display in the La Fonda Hotel in Taos since shortly after his death. They hang in a small office behind the hotel's front desk and are available for viewing.
He continued to write despite his physical frailty. In his last months he authored numerous poems, reviews, essays, and a robust defence of his last novel against those who sought to suppress it. His last significant work was a spirited reflection on the New Testament Book of Revelation, Apocalypse. After being discharged from a sanatorium he died at the Villa Robermond, Vence, France in 1930 at the age of 44. Frieda returned to live on the ranch in Taos and later her third husband brought Lawrence's ashes to rest there in a small chapel set amidst the mountains of New Mexico.
Posthumous reputation
The obituaries following Lawrence's death were, with the notable exception of E. M. Forster, unsympathetic, ill-informed or hostile. Fortunately there were those who articulated a more balanced recognition of the significance of this author's life and works. For example, his longtime friend Catherine Carswell summed up his life in a letter to the periodical Time and Tide published on 16th March 1930. In response to his mean spirited critics she claimed:
In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and life-long delicacy, poverty that lasted for three quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and he was right. He painted and made things, and sang, and rode. He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man's, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed. Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilization and the cant of literary cliques. He would have laughed lightly and cursed venomously in passing at the solemn owls—each one secretly chained by the leg—who now conduct his inquest. To do his work and lead his life in spite of them took some doing, but he did it, and long after they are forgotten, sensitive and innocent people—if any are left—will turn Lawrence's pages and will know from them what sort of a rare man Lawrence was.
A defense of Lawrence was also put forward by Aldous Huxley in his introduction to a collection of letters published in 1932. However, the most influential advocate of Lawrence's contribution to literature was the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis who asserted that the author had made an important contribution to the tradition of English fiction. Leavis stressed that The Rainbow, Women in Love, and the short stories and tales were major works of art. Later, the Lady Chatterley Trial of 1962 ensured Lawrence's popularity (and notoriety) with a wider public.
Some modern critics, including Lawrence biographer Brenda Maddox, have charged that Lawrence was over-prolific, and that his reputation was harmed by the amount of simply bad writing that he published; however, Lawrence made his living exclusively by his writing, and as a result wrote more commercial work than modernists such as Joyce or Woolf.
A number of feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have questioned Lawrence's sexual politics, and this questioning has damaged his reputation in some quarters during the last thirty years. On the other hand, Lawrence continues to find an audience for his artistic vision, and the ongoing publication of a new scholarly edition of his letters and writings has demonstrated the range of his achievement.
Works
Realism was the main feature of Lawrence's writings and his unflinching depictions of the gritty struggles of everyday life give many of his novels a melancholy tone. His poems help to balance this with many powerful and evocative descriptions of nature, although moments of beauty are present in his books.
Among his many works, most famous are his novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). These all take place in and around Eastwood, Lawrence's birthplace, which was a grim industrial mining town. Lawrence would return here in his literature despite leaving it in real life, giving it an importance similar to that held by Wessex for Thomas Hardy, whom Lawrence admired.
Kangaroo, Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent are usually considered together as his "leadership novels". They contain some of the ideas that contributed to his plan for Rananim (meaning 'celebrations' and taken from a Hebrew folk song), the community of like-minded writers and artists
Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies, and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and the misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in voluntary exile, self defined as a "savage pilgrimage."[1] 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."[2] 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. He is now valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists have questioned the attitudes to women and sexuality found in his works.
Life
Early life (1885-1912)
The fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner, and Lydia, née Beardsall, a former schoolmistress, David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born and spent his formative years in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom. His birthplace, in Eastwood, 8a Victoria Street, is now a museum. His working class background and the tensions between his mismatched parents provided the raw material for a number of his early works and Lawrence would return to this locality, which he was to call "the country of my heart".",[3] as a setting for much of his fiction.
The young Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School 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. He went on to become a full-time student and received a teaching certificate from University College Nottingham in 1908. During these early years he was working on his first poems, some short stories, and a draft of a novel, Laetitia, that was eventually to become The White Peacock. At the end of 1907 he won a short story competition in the Nottingham Guardian, the first time that he had gained any wider recognition for his literary talents.
In the autumn of 1908 the newly qualified Lawrence left his childhood home for London. Whilst teaching in Davidson Road School, Croydon he continued writing. Some of the early poetry, submitted by Jessie Chambers, came to the attention of Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of the influential The English Review. Hueffer then commissioned the story Odour of Chrysanthemums which, when published in that magazine, encouraged Heinemann, a London publisher, to ask Lawrence for more work. His career as a professional author now began in earnest, although he taught for a further year. Shortly after the final proofs of his first published novel The White Peacock appeared in 1910, Lawrence's mother died. She had been ill with cancer. The young man was devastated and he was to describe the next few months as "his sick year". It is clear that Lawrence had an extremely close relationship with his mother and his grief following her death became a major turning-point in his life, just as the death of Mrs. Morel forms a major turning-point in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, a work that often faithfully records much of the writer's experience of his provincial upbringing.
During 1911 Lawrence was introduced to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader, who acted as a mentor, provided further encouragement, and became a valued friend. Throughout these months the young author revised Paul Morel, the first sketch of what was to become 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.
Blithe spirits (1912-1914)
In March 1912 the author met the free spirited woman with whom he was to share the rest of his life. She was six years older than her new lover, married and with three young children. Frieda Weekley née von Richthofen was then the wife of Lawrence's former modern languages professor from Nottingham University, Ernest Weekley. Frieda was bored with her marriage and she had already had brief affairs with other lovers, including Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud. She now eloped with Lawrence to her parent's home in Metz, a garrison town in Germany near the disputed border with France. Their stay here included Lawrence's first brush with militarism when he was arrested and accused of being a British spy, before being released following an intervention from Frieda's father. After this encounter Lawrence left for a small hamlet to the south of Munich where he was joined by Frieda for their 'honeymoon', later memorialised in the series of love poems entitled Look! We Have Come Through (1917).
From Germany they walked southwards across the Alps to Italy, a journey that was recorded in the first of his brilliant travel books, a collection of linked essays entitled Twilight in Italy and the unfinished novel, Mr Noon. During his stay in Italy, Lawrence completed the final version of Sons and Lovers that, when published in 1913, was acknowledged to represent a vivid portrait of the realities of working class provincial life. The couple returned to England in 1913 for a short visit. Lawrence now encountered and befriended John Middleton Murry, the critic, and the short story writer from New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield. Lawrence and Frieda soon went back to Italy, staying in a cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia. Here he started writing the first draft of a work of fiction that was to be transformed into two of his finest novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. Eventually Frieda obtained her divorce. The couple returned to England at the outbreak of World War I and were married on the 13 July 1914.
The nightmare (1914-1919)
Frieda'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. The Rainbow (1915) was suppressed after an investigation into its alleged obscenity in 1915. Later, they were even accused of spying and signalling to German submarines off of the coast of Cornwall where they lived at Zennor. During this period he finished a sequel to The Rainbow, that many regard as his masterpiece. This radical new work, Women in Love, is a key text of European modernism. In it Lawrence explores the destructive features of contemporary civilization through the evolving relationships of four major characters as they reflect upon the value of the arts, politics, economics, sexual experience, friendship and marriage. This book is a bleak, bitter vision of humanity and proved impossible to publish in wartime conditions. It is now widely recognised as an English novel of great dramatic force and intellectual subtlety.
In late 1917, after constant harassment by the military authorities, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall at three days' notice under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This persecution was later described in an autobiographical chapter of his Australian novel, Kangaroo, published in 1923. In 1918, he lived in the small, beautiful rural village of Hermitage near Newbury in Berkshire. Until 1919 he was compelled by poverty to shift from address to address and barely survived a severe attack of influenza.
The savage pilgrimage begins (1919-1922)
After the traumatic experience of the war years, Lawrence began what he termed his 'savage pilgrimage', a time of voluntary exile. He escaped from England at the earliest practical opportunity, to return only twice for brief visits, and with Frieda spent the remainder of his life travelling; settling down for only short periods. This wanderlust took him to Italy, Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), Australia, North America, Mexico and after returning once more in Italy, southern France.
Lawrence abandoned England in November 1919 and headed south; first to the Abruzzi district in central Italy and then onwards to Capri and the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, Sicily. From Sicily he made brief excursions to Sardinia, Monte Cassino, Malta, Northern Italy, Austria and Southern Germany. Many of these places appeared in his writings. New novels included The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod and the fragment entitled Mr Noon (the first part of which was published in the Phoenix anthology of his works, and the entirety in 1984). He experimented with shorter novels or novellas, such as The Captain's Doll, The Fox and The Ladybird. In addition, some of his short stories were issued in the collection England, My England and Other Stories. During these years he produced a number of poems about the natural world in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Lawrence is widely recognised as one of the finest travel writers in the English language and Sea and Sardinia, a book that describes a brief journey from Taormina undertaken in January 1921, is a vivid recreation of the life of the inhabitants of this part of the Mediterranean. Less well known is the brilliant memoir of Maurice Magnus, in which Lawrence recalls his visit to the monastery of Monte Cassino. Other non-fiction books include two studies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Movements in European History, a school textbook that was published under a pseudonym, a reflection of his blighted reputation in England.
Seeking a new world (1922-1925)
In late February 1922 the Lawrences left Europe behind with the intention of migrating to the United States. They sailed in an easterly direction, first to Ceylon and then on to Australia. A short residence in Darlington, Western Australia, which included an encounter with local writer Mollie Skinner, was followed by a brief stop in the small coastal town of Thirroul in New South Wales, during which Lawrence completed Kangaroo, a novel about local fringe politics that also revealed a lot about his wartime experiences in Cornwall.
Resuming their journey, Frieda and Lawrence finally arrived in the USA in September 1922. Here they encountered Mabel Dodge Luhan, a prominent socialite, and considered establishing a utopian community on what was then known as the 160-acre Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and Frieda acquired the property, now called the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, in 1924 in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. By all accounts Lawrence loved this ranch high up in the mountains, the only home that he ever owned. He stayed in New Mexico for two years, with extended visits to Lake Chapala and Oaxaca in Mexico.
Whilst in the New World, Lawrence rewrote and published his Studies in Classic American Literature, a set of critical essays begun in 1917, and later described by Edmund Wilson as " one of the few first-rate books that have ever been written on the subject". These provocative and original interpretations, with their insights into symbolism, New England Transcendentalism and the puritan sensibility, were a significant factor in the revival of the reputation of Herman Melville during the early 1920s. In addition, Lawrence completed a number of new fictional works, including The Boy in the Bush, The Plumed Serpent, St Mawr, The Woman who Rode Away, The Princess and assorted short stories. He also found time to produce some more travel writing, such as the collection of linked excursions that became Mornings in Mexico.
A brief voyage to England at the end of 1923 was a failure and he soon returned to Taos, convinced that his life as an author now lay in America. However, in March 1925 he suffered a near fatal attack of malaria and tuberculosis whilst on a third visit to Mexico. Although he eventually recovered, the diagnosis of his condition obliged him to return once again to Europe. He was dangerously ill and poor health limited the ability to travel for the remainder of his life.
Approaching death (1925-1930)
Lawrence and Frieda set up home in a villa in Northern Italy, living near to Florence whilst he wrote The Virgin and the Gipsy and the various versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). This book, his last major novel, was initially published in private editions in Florence and Paris and reinforced his notoriety. Lawrence responded robustly to those who claimed to be offended, penning a large number of satirical poems, published under the title of "Pansies" and "Nettles", as well as a tract on Pornography and Obscenity.
The return to Italy allowed Lawrence to renew some of his old friendships and during these years he was particularly close to Aldous Huxley, a loyal companion who was to edit the first collection of Lawrence's letters after his death, along with a generous memoir. With another friend, the artist Earl Brewster, Lawrence found the time to visit 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 Sketches of Etruscan Places, a beautiful book that contrasts the lively past with the brutal, bombastic stupidity of Mussolini's fascism. Lawrence continued to produce fiction, including short stories and The Escaped Cock (also published as The Man Who Died), an unorthodox reworking of the Christian belief of the resurrection that affirms the life of the body. 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. Nine of the Lawrence oils have been on permanent display in the La Fonda Hotel in Taos since shortly after his death. They hang in a small office behind the hotel's front desk and are available for viewing.
He continued to write despite his physical frailty. In his last months he authored numerous poems, reviews, essays, and a robust defence of his last novel against those who sought to suppress it. His last significant work was a spirited reflection on the New Testament Book of Revelation, Apocalypse. After being discharged from a sanatorium he died at the Villa Robermond, Vence, France in 1930 at the age of 44. Frieda returned to live on the ranch in Taos and later her third husband brought Lawrence's ashes to rest there in a small chapel set amidst the mountains of New Mexico.
Posthumous reputation
The obituaries following Lawrence's death were, with the notable exception of E. M. Forster, unsympathetic, ill-informed or hostile. Fortunately there were those who articulated a more balanced recognition of the significance of this author's life and works. For example, his longtime friend Catherine Carswell summed up his life in a letter to the periodical Time and Tide published on 16th March 1930. In response to his mean spirited critics she claimed:
In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and life-long delicacy, poverty that lasted for three quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and he was right. He painted and made things, and sang, and rode. He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man's, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed. Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilization and the cant of literary cliques. He would have laughed lightly and cursed venomously in passing at the solemn owls—each one secretly chained by the leg—who now conduct his inquest. To do his work and lead his life in spite of them took some doing, but he did it, and long after they are forgotten, sensitive and innocent people—if any are left—will turn Lawrence's pages and will know from them what sort of a rare man Lawrence was.
A defense of Lawrence was also put forward by Aldous Huxley in his introduction to a collection of letters published in 1932. However, the most influential advocate of Lawrence's contribution to literature was the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis who asserted that the author had made an important contribution to the tradition of English fiction. Leavis stressed that The Rainbow, Women in Love, and the short stories and tales were major works of art. Later, the Lady Chatterley Trial of 1962 ensured Lawrence's popularity (and notoriety) with a wider public.
Some modern critics, including Lawrence biographer Brenda Maddox, have charged that Lawrence was over-prolific, and that his reputation was harmed by the amount of simply bad writing that he published; however, Lawrence made his living exclusively by his writing, and as a result wrote more commercial work than modernists such as Joyce or Woolf.
A number of feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have questioned Lawrence's sexual politics, and this questioning has damaged his reputation in some quarters during the last thirty years. On the other hand, Lawrence continues to find an audience for his artistic vision, and the ongoing publication of a new scholarly edition of his letters and writings has demonstrated the range of his achievement.
Works
Realism was the main feature of Lawrence's writings and his unflinching depictions of the gritty struggles of everyday life give many of his novels a melancholy tone. His poems help to balance this with many powerful and evocative descriptions of nature, although moments of beauty are present in his books.
Among his many works, most famous are his novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). These all take place in and around Eastwood, Lawrence's birthplace, which was a grim industrial mining town. Lawrence would return here in his literature despite leaving it in real life, giving it an importance similar to that held by Wessex for Thomas Hardy, whom Lawrence admired.
Kangaroo, Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent are usually considered together as his "leadership novels". They contain some of the ideas that contributed to his plan for Rananim (meaning 'celebrations' and taken from a Hebrew folk song), the community of like-minded writers and artists
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