The Life of the Author: D. H. Lawrence

Addresses the whole of D. H. Lawrence’s life and writing career—integrating biography, critical analysis, and recent scholarship in a single volume.

The Life of the Author: D. H. Lawrence is a focused exploration of the whole of the author’s life and writing career. Combining biographical detail and close readings of works in different genres, the book illuminates the complexities of Lawrence’s writing through a careful, questioning approach to biographical sources and recent scholarship.

Andrew Harrison provides original insights into Lawrence’s relationship to working-class experience, his anti-suffragist feminist views, his reaction to the Great War, his responses to racial and cultural difference, his attitudes towards sex, sexuality, and sexual identity, and much more.

Nine accessible chapters address important subjects in the author’s life and writing, including his treatment of taboo topics, his conflicted relationship with the literary marketplace, and the ways in which his writing challenged English middle-class values. Each chapter draws upon the biographical record to provide an interpretive context while highlighting aspects of Lawrence’s work that relate to present-day concerns, such as his critical responses to wartime propaganda and censorship, his critique of heteronormativity, and his lifelong concern with issues around mental health and wholeness of being.

Designed to help readers develop a fresh understanding of Lawrence’s writing, The Life of the Author: D. H. Lawrence:

• Investigates Lawrence’s wartime experiences, tracing his transformation from an author who wished to change the attitudes of his readers into a radical anti-establishment figure.
• Addresses Lawrence’s explorations of gender fluidity and non-normative sexual identities in his fiction.
• Discusses Lawrence’s concern with post-war social reconstruction and his risk-taking exploration of revolutionary political and religious movements in his novels of the 1920s.
• Engages with psychoanalytic criticism on the attachment issues that shaped Lawrence’s life and writing, showing how he attempted to confront the psychic wounds of his childhood.

Based on materials and approaches the author has developed teaching Lawrence for more than two decades, The Life of the Author: D. H. Lawrence is an excellent textbook for undergraduate students taking English and English Literature courses, as well as graduate students discussing Lawrence in the contexts of early twentieth-century literature, literary modernism, and sexualities in modern literature.