D.H. Lawrence
1885–1930 · England
“And I never shall meet the right woman while you live.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through D.H. Lawrence
Drew From(2)
who shaped D.H. Lawrence
- Lawrence called Hardy his master and principal influence, and the year after this novel he wrote his longest piece of criticism, the Study of Thomas Hardy, partly misreading and rewriting Hardy's books into a manifesto for his own art.
- He opens, as Hardy does, on the land that shapes the hero, a mining village standing in for Wessex, and inherits Hardy's flesh-and-spirit split and his sensual attention to body and landscape. Where Hardy's protagonists are tragic and passive, Lawrence pushes toward self-conscious characters, but the lineage is his own to claim.
via Middlemarch
- Lawrence named Eliot as the origin of the psychological novel, the one who "put the action on the inside," and this book carries that technique to a new pitch: the drama is almost entirely internal, the war between Mrs Morel and her son fought in feeling, not incident.
- The patient, sympathetic anatomy of provincial lives that Eliot perfected in Middlemarch is the realist inheritance Lawrence works from before he breaks it open from within.
Portraits
The young-Lawrence portrait reprinted as frontmatter in Nehls' three-volume composite biography and Worthen's 2006 life — the standard likeness of Lawrence around the time he eloped with Frieda and published Sons and Lovers.
1912
The 1921 passport portrait from his restless post-war wandering years (note the filename's typo 'Larence' is the actual Commons file name).
1921
Famous Quotes
She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his own feet—she will suck him up.
he mother and son walked down Station Street, feeling the excitement of lovers having an adventure together.
nd I've never—you know, Paul—I've never had a husband—not really—
ut no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city's gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.
About D.H. Lawrence
English novelist, poet, and critic, born in the coal-mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a barely literate collier and a former pupil-teacher whose fierce ambition for her sons shaped his early life and his fiction. Sons and Lovers (1913) drew openly on that childhood, with Paul Morel a thinly veiled self-portrait. In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), the German aristocratic wife of his former modern-languages professor; they married in 1914 and spent much of their lives wandering Italy, Australia, and the American Southwest in what one biographer called a "savage pilgrimage." His frank treatment of sexuality made him a perennial target of censors: The Rainbow (1915) was seized and burnt as obscene, and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was banned for decades, its 1960 acquittal in a landmark British obscenity trial a watershed for literary freedom. He died of tuberculosis in Vence, France, in 1930, aged 44.