It’s the birthday of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930, #diedtooyoung), one of the major English authors of the 20th century, and I know what you’re all thinking so just get your minds out of the gutter right now. This is a family show.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, the son of a coal miner. (If you need to stop and watch the famous “Coal Miner Son” sketch from Monty Python linked here, I’ll understand.) While Lawrence’s father was a big tough working class fellow and nearly illiterate, his mother was from a genteel, middle-class-ish family who’d fallen on hard times; their social and educational differences caused problems in the marriage, and after Lawrence’s older brother died of pneumonia, his mother nursed Lawrence himself back from pneumonia. They grew so close that Lawrence once wrote of her, “We have loved each other almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We knew each other by instinct,” thus giving critics lots and lots of Oedipal material to hash over when reviewing Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers (1913).

Lawrence got a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham, in 1908, and began teaching in Croydon. By then he had already starting writing poems and stories, and his special friend Jessie Chambers (wink wink) sent some of his poems to Ford Madox Ford (then Heuffer), a big shot editor and novelist himself, who helped get Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, published in 1911, just after Lawrence’s mother died. (She had cancer, and Lawrence and a sister gave her an overdose of morphine to help things along.) The Trespasser followed in 1912, then Sons and Lovers, during which time Lawrence ran off with a German woman named Frieda Weekley; they married as soon as she could get a divorce. Things were rocky: the marriage was scandalous, she lost her children in the divorce and blamed him, and when WWI broke out, being German did not endear her to, well, anyone British. (The government at one point suspected them of signaling German submarines and relocated them to London.) Lawrence published The Rainbow in 1915 and accusations of its being “filth” started rolling in. Around 1919, Lawrence and Weekley left England to live in self-imposed exile all over the world.

 

Lawrence wrote about eight more novels, the most famous of which is Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), a novel full of sex and four-letter words. The novel was not published in fully unexpurgated form until 1960; the publisher, Penguin, then went to trial for obscenity and won—a landmark event for publishing in the UK.

After having nearly died several times throughout his life (pneumonia, the flu epidemic, malaria, and like that), Lawrence succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 44 in France.

Have a subdued September Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.