D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, essayist and critic whose writing grew out of the social world of the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Born at Eastwood in 1885 to a miner and a former schoolteacher, he became a teacher before turning increasingly to literature. His early fiction, particularly Sons and Lovers, drew on the tensions of his family life, class mobility and industrial surroundings while developing an intense psychological treatment of love, dependence, sexuality and individual freedom.

Lawrence’s later works, including The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, challenged contemporary conventions about sexuality, marriage, gender and the body and repeatedly encountered censorship. During the First World War he and his German-born wife Frieda were viewed with suspicion, and after the war they travelled widely through Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas. Lawrence died in France in 1930. His reputation remains contested, but his experiments with modernist fiction and his critique of industrial modernity made him one of the most influential English writers of the twentieth century.