Publisher's Synopsis
The first volume of the three-volume Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence draws on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, many of them hitherto unpublished, to reveal a complex portrait of an extraordinary man. It describes his upbringing in a small colliery town in Nottinghamshire, his years spent as a teacher and his disastrous sexual experiments with Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke and Alice Dax; provides a radical new account of his early relationship with Frieda Weekley, Lawrence's 'woman of a life-time'; and ends with the completion of his great autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. This volume has already established itself as the most complete and authoritative account available. The second volume of the acclaimed Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence covers the years 1912-22, the period in which Lawrence forged his reputation as one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. During this period Lawrence produced the trio of novels with which he was to revolutionise English fiction over the next decade. It was a painful process: Sons and Lovers was crudely cut by its publisher; The Rainbow was destroyed by court order and Women in Love took almost three years to find a publisher. Drawing on memoirs, oral recollections, and unpublished manuscript material, this volume opens a new perspective on the central period of Lawrence's life and literary career. It deals squarely with the vexed issue of his personal life but above all it reveals the triumph of Lawrence's art during a decade of extraordinary trials in which he established himself as the most innovative and notorious novelist of his generation. The final volume of the Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence chronicles his progress from leaving Europe in 1922 to his death in Venice in 1930. Based on much new or unfamiliar material, it describes his travels in Ceylon, Australia, the USA and Mexico in an increasingly desperate search for an ideal community. With his return to Europe in 1925, there is a detailed account of his rediscovery of painting, his battle against censorship, and the vitality with which he resisted the debilitating effects of tuberculosis. Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover are usually seen as the literary landmarks of these years; but Lawrence also wrote remarkable novellas, essays, criticism, short stories and poems. Lawrence is revealed here not as the impotent and self-obsessed figure of popular legend, but as a man more complex, more humorous, and more exemplary in his resolute grappling with the central problems of life and death.
