D.H.

Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one
of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. "Snake" and "How Beastly the Bourgeoisie is" are probably his most anthologized poems. David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, central England. He was the fourth child of a struggling coal miner who was a heavy drinker. His mother was a former school teacher, greatly superior in education to her husband. Lawrence's childhood was dominated by poverty and friction between his parents. He was educated at Nottingham High School, to which he had won a scholarship. He worked as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory and then for four years as a pupil-teacher. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence matriculated at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career. Lawrence's mother died in 1910; he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine. Lawrence's mother Lydia was second daughter of Robert Beardsall and his wife Lydia Newton of Sneinton; originally lower middle-class, the Beardsalls had suffered financial disaster in the 1860s and Lydia - in spite of attempts to work as a pupil-teacher - had been forced into employment as a sweated home-worker in the lace industry. But she had had more education than her husband, and passed on to at least two of her sons and both of her daughters an enduring love of books, a religious faith and a commitment to selfimprovement, as well as a profound desire to move out of the working class in which she felt herself trapped. Lawrence found the demands of teaching at Davidson Road School a large school in a poor area very different from Eastwood under a protective headmaster. Nevertheless he established himself as an energetic teacher, prepared to employ innovative methods of instruction: Shakespeare lessons became practical drama classes, for example. The contacts he made through school were probably more important than his job. Arthur McLeod, on the Davidson staff, read Lawrence's work and loaned him books; Agnes Mason (rather older) tended to mother him, but a younger friend of hers Helen Corke, at another school interested him. Above all, Lawrence was trying to develop his writing career by working in the evenings and holidays; he was engaged on yet another draft of his novel and writing a lot of poetry. In the summer of 1909 came the breakthrough: Jessie Chambers sent some of his poems to Ford Madox Hueffer, at the English Review. Hueffer not only printed them, but saw Lawrence, and after reading the manuscript of The White Peacock wrote to the publisher William Heinemann recommending it. He also got Lawrence to write more about his mining background. Lawrence wrote 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' and his first play, A Collier's Friday Night; in 1910 he would write a second play, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd. Hueffer's successor at the English Review, Austin Harrison, went on printing Lawrence's stories and poems. D.H. Lawrence died in Vence, France on March 2, 1930. He also gained posthumous renown for his expressionistic paintings completed in the 1920s.