The Best Of D H Lawrence

The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, a dynasty of farmers and craftsmen who live in the east Midlands of England, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The book spans a period of roughly 65 years from the 1840s to 1905, and shows how the love relationships of the Brangwens change against the backdrop of the increasing industrialisation of Britain. The first central character, Tom Brangwen, is a farmer whose experience of the world does not stretch beyond these two counties; while the last, Ursula, his granddaughter, studies at university and becomes a teacher in the progressively urbanised, capitalist and industrial world.

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize An electrifying, revelatory new biography of D. H. Lawrence, with a focus on his difficult middle years “Never trust the teller,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, “trust the tale.” Everyone who knew him told stories about Lawrence, and Lawrence told stories about everyone he knew. He also told stories about himself, again and again: a pioneer of autofiction, no writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature. In Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson tells a new story about the author, focusing on his decade of superhuman writing and travel between 1915, when The Rainbow was suppressed following an obscenity trial, and 1925, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Taking after Lawrence’s own literary model, Dante, and adopting the structure of The Divine Comedy, Burning Man is a distinctly Lawrentian book, one that pursues Lawrence around the globe and reflects his life of wild allegory. Eschewing the confines of traditional biography, it offers a triptych of lesser-known episodes drawn from lesser-known sources, including tales of Lawrence as told by his friends in letters, memoirs, and diaries. Focusing on three turning points in Lawrence’s pilgrimage (his crises in Cornwall, Italy, and New Mexico) and three central adversaries—his wife, Frieda; the writer Maurice Magnus; and his patron, Mabel Dodge Luhan—Wilson uncovers a lesser-known Lawrence, both as a writer and as a man. Strikingly original, superbly researched, and always revelatory, Burning Man is a marvel of iconoclastic biography. With flair and focus, Wilson unleashes a distinct perspective on one of history’s most beloved and infamous writers.

You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.

One of the most controversial yet celebrated names in English Literature, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) wrote his first novel The White Peacock in 1931. Lawrence's novels like Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928) were banned for explicit description of sexual activity and had to be privately printed. Lawrence's personal life was beset with turmoil. His childhood was scarred by a traumatic sexual experience .In 1912, he ran away with Frieda Weekly, his professor's wife. In 1929, Lawrence became seriously ill and died of tuberculosis on 2 March 1930.

Jeffrey Meyers, the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Hemingway and George Orwell, offers this masterly work on British novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Meyers' fresh insights into Lawrence's life illuminate Lawrence's working-class childhood, his tempestuous marriage, and his death in France after the scandalous publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, revealing Lawrence's complex method of intermingling autobiography and fiction. Through intensive research and access to unpublished essays and letters of Lawrence and his circle, Meyers describes the circumstances of his mother's death, the reason for the suppression of The Rainbow, and the author's protean (and extreme) sexuality that mirrored that of his fiction.

"Etruscan Places" is a historical and anthropological guide into the world of the Etruscans people. The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days and whom the Romans, in their usual neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn't have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d'étre of people like the Romans. The main source of information we have today about the Etruscan way of life is the artifacts found in their tombs, which forms the focus for this book.

Reveals the literary & psychological motivations underlying a classic of 20th century literature by one of its acknowledged masters.