D.H. Lawrence – författare

Notes and Introduction by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury.With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous 'Lady Chatterley trial' heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery.Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservativism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husband's gamekeeper, is a complex one open to a variety of conflicting interpretations.This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation of readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence's bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the complicated relations between love and sex.

Introduction and Notes by Dr Howard J. Booth, University of Kent at Canterbury.‘When you have experienced Sons and Lovers you have lived through the agonies of the young Lawrence striving to win free from his old life’.Richard AldingtonThis novel is Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece in which he explores emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers.Lawrence’s novels are perhaps the most powerful exploration in the genre in English of family, class, sexuality and relationships in youth and early adulthood.

Trapped in a marriage which has become sterile and joyless since her husband's return from the trenches of the First World War, partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, Connie seizes the chance of sexual fulfilment she had thought lost to her forever.First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous ‘Lady Chatterley trial’ heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery.

How is a woman ever to have a husband when the men all belong to their mothers?During the miner's strike of 1912, newly-married Minnie discovers her husband Luther has made another woman pregnant. The drama reaches boiling point as Minnie struggles to reclaim her husband - not only from her rival but also from his formidable mother.Best known as a great novelist, Lawrence was also a remarkable playwright, heir to and equal of Strindberg and Chekhov. His passionate belief in the power of intimacy and sexuality rings out in his finest play, one of the most memorable of the 20th century.

Originally published in Italy in 1928, and unavailable in Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an infamous obscenity trial, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is now regarded as one of the pivotal novels of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s determination to explore every aspect – sexual, social, psychological – of Lady Chatterley’s adulterous liaison with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors makes for a profound meditation on the human condition, the forces of nature and the social constraints that people struggle to overcome.Containing autobiographical elements and set in the author’s native Nottinghamshire, Lawrence’s final novel had a profound impact on twentieth-century culture and sexual attitudes, while confirming his standing as one of the most eminent fiction writers that England has produced.

Nellie March and Jill Banford manage an ailing Berkshire farm at the time of the First World War, a task which is made all the more complicated by the frequent rampages of a local fox through their chicken coop. When a young soldier turns up and begins to interfere with the farm and the lives of the two women, they must find ways to react to this new fox in their midst. A compelling study of the question of power, gender and sexuality, as well as a realistic portrayal of wartime rural England, The Fox showcases Lawrence’s inimitable gift for psychological observation and dramatic description.

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a battleground. Gertrude turns increasingly towards her two eldest sons, William and Paul, and determines that they will not grow up to be coalminers living in poverty like their father. Yet soon William falls ill, and Paul seeks to escape his mother’s suffocating influence through a series of relationships.Closely autobiographical, and widely considered to be the first English novel with a truly working-class background, Sons and Lovers is the affecting portrait of a mining family torn apart by class divisions and the conflict between filial love and the urge to follow one’s own desires.

First encountered in Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are now grown-up women living in the English Midlands at the time of the First World War. Each becomes involved in a love affair: Ursula with the misanthropic intellectual Rupert Birkin, and Gudrun with Gerald Crich, a successful industrialist. The contrast between the two relationships – the former happy and fulfilling, the latter tempestuous and violent – facilitates an examination of both the regenerative and destructive aspects of human passion, while the novel’s Alpine climax is revelatory of the intensity of close male friendship.Heavily revised by the author in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the controversy surrounding the publication of The Rainbow, which had been suppressed on grounds of obscenity, Women in Love appeared first in the US in 1920, with a British edition following the next year. Straddling the boundary between nineteenth-century realism and modernism, it was regarded by Lawrence as his most accomplished work, and is considered by many to be the author’s masterpiece.

Introduction and Notes by Dr Jeff Wallace, University of Glamorgan.Lawrence's finest, most mature novel initially met with disgust and incomprehension. In the love affairs of two sisters, Ursula with Rupert, and Gudrun with Gerald, critics could only see a sorry tale of sexual depravity and philosophical obscurity. Women in Love is, however, a profound response to a whole cultural crisis. The 'progress' of the modern industrialised world had led to the carnage of the First World War.What, then, did it mean to call ourselves 'human'? On what grounds could we place ourselves above and beyond the animal world? What are the definitive forms of our relationships - love, marriage, family, friendship - really worth? And how might they be otherwise? Without directly referring to the war, Women in Love explores these questions with restless energy. As a sequel to The Rainbow, the novel develops experimental techniques which made Lawrence one of the most important writers of the Modernist movement.

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading.In 1915, Lawrence's frank representation of sexuality in The Rainbow caused a furore and the novel was seized by the police and banned almost as soon as it was published. Today it is recognised as one of the classic English novels of the twentieth century.The Rainbow is about three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century. Within this framework Lawrence's essential concern is with the passional lives of his characters as he explores the pressures that determine their lives, using a religious symbolism in which the 'rainbow' of the title is his unifying motif.His primary focus is on the individual's struggle to growth and fulfilment within marriage and changing social circumstances, a process shown to grow more difficult through the generations. Young Ursula Brangwen, whose story is continued in Women in Love, is finally the central figure in Lawrence's anatomy of the confining structures of English social life and the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation on the human psyche.

With an Introduction and Notes by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury.Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930.It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) var en engelsk författare, diktare, essäist och litteraturkritiker. Han hör till några av de största författarna under 1900-talet. Han utmanade samtiden med sitt uppror mot det etablerade samhället, sina beskrivningar av kvinnors sexualitet och inte minst med sina explicita beskrivningar av sex. Genombrottsromanen Söner och älskande och hans sista roman – den skandalomsusade Lady Chatterleys älskare – är huvudverk från den tiden.

I sitt äktenskap med aristokraten Sir Clifford får Constance Chatterley nöja sig med en tillvaro utan sexuell njutning, eftersom hennes man återvänder hem från första världskriget invalidiserad och lam från midjan och ner. Han försummar henne till och med känslomässigt och hon dras därför till slottets skogvaktare, Oliver Mellors. De inleder en känslofylld affär och i mötet med Mellors upplever Constance känslomässig ömhet, sexuell tillfredsställelse och spirande kärlek.

Lady Chatterleys älskare gavs ut privat i Italien 1928 och först 1961, efter åtskilliga års censurer och rättsfall, gavs den till slut ut i hemlandet.

”Lawrence levererar levande skildringar av förhållanden, som kan vara svåra att beskriva intellektuellt – han är en skicklig skildrare av våldsamhet, av förhållandet mellan man och kvinna och av döden” – Politikens Verdenslitteratur

"Den största fantasifulla författaren av vår generation." – E.M. Forster

“En modig och viktig bok, passionerad och galet ambitiös” – The Independent

“Ett mästerverk” – The Guardian