David Herbert Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885 at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, the son of a coalminer and a woman who had been a teacher. He spend much of his childhood ill and confined to his bed, on one occasion due to contracting tuberculosis. His parents would argue constantly and Lawrence tended to side with his mother, to whom he grew very close. Living in near poverty his mother was determined that he should not become a miner like his father. Instead she encouraged him academically and Lawrence was persuaded to work hard at Nottingham High School until the age of fifteen when he had to seek employment in a surgical goods factory. This period of his life and his friendship with Jessie Chambers is reflected in Sons and Lovers, a novel published in 1913 and its character Miriam. Saving the necessary ?0 fee, Lawrence attained a scholarship to University College, Nottingham where he worked to get a teacher's certificate from 1906 onward.

At this time he began writing and produced a first novel, The White Peacock (1911) and the follow-up, The Trespasser (1912). However, his teaching career was soon destroyed by the death of his mother which predictably shook him up terribly. He became extremely ill and was encouraged to give up teaching whereupon he wrote and published one of his most famous novels, the autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913). Initally, though, it was rejected by Heinemann and Lawrence wrote to his friend Edward Garnett, "Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got the white of egg in their veins and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed". In all his rage, he had clearly not foreseen the incredible publishing hurdles to come. His fine letters were edited by Aldous Huxley himself.

In 1912, he had eloped to the continent with the German wife of his old Nottingham professor, Frieda Weekley, and he married her in 1914. However, this was by far the worst time for a British subject to marry a German and the Lawrences unsurprisingly despised the First World War and became very unhappy until its end in 1918. The couple moved continually and Lawrence wrote four very personal travel books as a result. They were, however, very poor and their relationship was often marred by tempestuous spririts. At least during the war they had stayed put in England, unfit for service, making friends in literary circles such as Huxley, Mansfield and Russell. In 1913 he published Love Poems. The next novel, The Rainbow (1915), began Lawrence's troubles with the censor. His descriptions of sex and usage of swear words left him with his first difficulties with the law. A volume