D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912

This 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Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence draws on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, many of them previously unpublished, to reveal a complex portrait of an extraordinary man. It describes his upbringing in a small colliery town in Nottinghamshire, and the years he spent as a teacher in London before the blossoming of his literary career. It offers new insights into his disastrous sexual experiments with Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke, Louie Burrows and Alice Dax, and provides a radically new account of his early relationship with Frieda Weekley, six years older than he, married and with three children, but to Lawrence the "woman of a lifetime." The volume ends with Lawrence completing his great autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, destined to become one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century. Volume 2 (1912-1922) by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Volume 3 (1922-1930) by David Ellis will be published in late 1992 and early 1994, respectively. John Worthen, the author of D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (1979, Rowman and Littlefield) and D. H. Lawrence: A Literary Life (1989, St. Martin's Press) has edited several of the volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence. ID. H. Lawrence: The Cambridge Biography