John Worthen – författare

Johannes Brahms is often cast as repressed or emotionally distant. This nuanced biography by acclaimed biographer John Worthen reveals a more complex and human figure – brilliant, passionate and deeply committed both to his art and to those he loved. Brahms’s lifelong devotion to Clara Schumann shaped much of his personal and creative life, while his refusal to conform to social expectations kept him at odds with the genteel world around him. Raised in modest circumstances, he remained proudly working class even as he became one of the greatest composers of his time, with works ranging from the intimacy of the ‘Alto Rhapsody’ to the humane power of ‘A German Requiem’. Worthen shows us the man behind the music – blunt, brilliant and fiercely alive.

Shattering longstanding myths, this new biography reveals the robust and positive life of one of the nineteenth century's greatest composersThis candid, intimate, and compellingly written new biography offers a fresh account of Robert Schumann’s life. It confronts the traditional perception of the doom-laden Romantic, forced by depression into a life of helpless, poignant sadness. John Worthen’s scrupulous attention to the original sources reveals Schumann to have been an astute, witty, articulate, and immensely determined individual, who—with little support from his family and friends in provincial Saxony—painstakingly taught himself his craft as a musician, overcame problem after problem in his professional life, and married the woman he loved after a tremendous battle with her father. Schumann was neither manic depressive nor schizophrenic, although he struggled with mental illness. He worked prodigiously hard to develop his range of musical styles and to earn his living, only to be struck down, at the age of forty-four, by a vile and incurable disease.Worthen’s biography effectively de-mystifies a figure frequently regarded as a Romantic enigma. It frees Schumann from 150 years of mythmaking and unjustified psychological speculation. It reveals him, for the first time, as a brilliant, passionate, resolute musician and a thoroughly creative human being, the composer of arguably the best music of his generation.

D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider is an illuminating and clear-sighted portrait of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant, radical and misunderstood writers.John Worthen follows Lawrence's from his awkward and intense youth in Nottinghamshire, through his turbulent relationship with Frieda and the years of exile abroad to his premature death at the age of 44. His account is an intimate and absolutely compelling reappraisal of a man who believed himself to be an outsider, in angry revolt against his class, culture and country, and who was engaged in a furious commitment to his writing and a passionate struggle to live according to his beliefs.

D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider is an illuminating and clear-sighted portrait of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant, radical and misunderstood writers.John Worthen follows Lawrence's from his awkward and intense youth in Nottinghamshire, through his turbulent relationship with Frieda and the years of exile abroad to his premature death at the age of 44. His account is an intimate and absolutely compelling reappraisal of a man who believed himself to be an outsider, in angry revolt against his class, culture and country, and who was engaged in a furious commitment to his writing and a passionate struggle to live according to his beliefs.

This casebook on D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the first to address itself to the full text of the novel, first published in 1992. The introduction discusses the novel's composition and the range of approaches adopted by critics since its original publication in 1913. The nine essays that follow demonstrate the full extent of the contemporary critical response, from studies of narrative technique to psychoanalytic and gender-based analysis, and set the critical agenda for its study in the twenty-first century. This collection also reproduces excerpts from Lawrence's letters relating to Sons and Lovers, along with a full transcription of Alfred Booth Kuttner's 1916 Freudian analysis of the work.

This casebook on D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the first to address itself to the full text of the novel, first published in 1992. The introduction discusses the novel's composition and the range of approaches adopted by critics since its original publication in 1913. The nine essays that follow demonstrate the full extent of the contemporary critical response, from studies of narrative technique to psychoanalytic and gender-based analysis, and set the critical agenda for its study in the twenty-first century. This collection also reproduces excerpts from Lawrence's letters relating to Sons and Lovers, along with a full transcription of Alfred Booth Kuttner's 1916 Freudian analysis of the work.

“A Night or two after a worse Rogue there came, The head of the Gang, one Wordsworth by name . . .”—Coleridge, A Soliloquy of the full Moon, April 1802Over a dramatic six-month period in 1802, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, and the two Hutchinson sisters Sara and Mary formed a close-knit group whose members saw or wrote to one another constantly. Coleridge, whose marriage was collapsing, was in love with Sara, and Wordsworth was about to be married to Mary, who would be moving in beside Dorothy in their Grasmere cottage. Throughout this extraordinary period both poets worked on some of their finest and most familiar poems, Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. In this fascinating book, John Worthen recreates the group’s intertwined lives and the effect they had on one another.Drawing on the group’s surviving letters, and poems, as well as Dorothy’s diaries, Worthen throws new light on many old problems. He examines the prehistory of the events of 1802, the dynamics of the group between March and July, the summer of 1802, when Wordsworth and Dorothy visited Calais to see his ex-mistress and his daughter Caroline, and the wedding between Wordsworth and Mary in October of that year. In an epilogue he looks forward to the ways in which relationships changed during 1803, concentrating on a single day—11 January 1803—in the lives of the group.

By examining the family and financial circumstances of Wordsworth’s early years, this illuminating biography reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet’s most creative period of life and writing.   Features new research into Wordsworth’s financial situation, and into how the poet and his family survived financiallyOffers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten poem ‘The Recluse’Presents a new assessment of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge

This volume collects together the introductions and reviews for which D. H. Lawrence was responsible over the whole duration of his writing career, from 1911 to 1930: it includes the book review which was the last thing he ever wrote, in the Ad Astra Sanatorium in Vence. The forty-nine separate items include some of his most compelling literary productions: for example, the fascinating Memoir of Maurice Magnus of 1921-2, his only extended piece of biographical writing. The volume's Introduction not only outlines the literary contacts of Lawrence's career which led him to doing such work, but gives a fresh account of the life of a literary professional who regularly wrote in support of work in which he personally believed, and who also (rather surprisingly) wrote reviews of nearly thirty books. All the texts, including a number previously unpublished in Britain, have been edited and are supplied with extensive explanatory notes.

The First 'Women in Love' is one of Lawrence's greatest works, and is the only full length work of fiction which he completed between The Rainbow and the extensively revised Women in Love. It is a piece of fiction generated in the England, and the Europe, of the First World War. Publishers were alarmed by the fate of his previous novel The Rainbow and The First 'Women in Love' was rejected by every publisher who saw it. As a result it is a novel whose very existence as an independent text has been ignored, and which has not been published until now. The First 'Women in Love' shares much of its material with Women in Love, but its central relationships are dissimilar, and the ending radically different.

Lawrence's genius is unquestioned, but he is seldom considered a writer interested in comedy. This 1996 collection of essays by distinguished scholars explores the range, scope and sheer verve of Lawrence's comic writing. Comedy for Lawrence was not, as his contemporary Freud insisted, a mere defence mechanism. The comic mode enabled him to function parodically to undermine radically those forms of authority from which he always felt estranged. Lawrence's critique of the modern failure of the mystic impulse is present in all the comic moments in his writing where it is used to create an alternative cultural and social space. Lawrence used humour to distance himself from the dominant orthodoxy surrounding him, from the material of his fiction, from his readers, and, finally, from his own often intensely serious preoccupations. This book revises the popular image of Lawrence as a humourless writer and reveals his strategic use of a genuine comic talent.

D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love - 'the beginning of a new world', as he called it - suffered in the course of its revision, transcription, and publication some of the most spectacular damage ever inflicted upon one of his books. Until now no text of Women in Love has ever been published which is faithful to all of Lawrence's revisions. This edition, edited by scholars in England and America, clears the text of literally thousands of accumulated errors allowing its readers to read and understand the novelist's work as he himself created it. The edition includes the 'Foreword' Lawrence wrote in 1919 and two preliminary and discarded chapters which have attracted widespread critical and biographical discussion. The introduction gives a full history of the novel's composition, revision, publication and reception, and notes explain allusions and references; the textual apparatus records all variants between the base-text and the first printed editions.

D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love - 'the beginning of a new world', as he called it - suffered in the course of its revision, transcription, and publication some of the most spectacular damage ever inflicted upon one of his books. Until now no text of Women in Love has ever been published which is faithful to all of Lawrence's revisions. This edition, edited by scholars in England and America, clears the text of literally thousands of accumulated errors allowing its readers to read and understand the novelist's work as he himself created it. The edition includes the 'Foreword' Lawrence wrote in 1919 and two preliminary and discarded chapters which have attracted widespread critical and biographical discussion. The introduction gives a full history of the novel's composition, revision, publication and reception, and notes explain allusions and references; the textual apparatus records all variants between the base-text and the first printed editions.

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, Lawrence's first collection of short stories, was published in England in 1914 and in the USA in 1916. It contains some of the greatest stories he ever wrote: 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', 'Daughters of the Vicar', 'The Prussian Officer', and 'The White Stocking', with settings ranging from the mining community of Eastwood to Germany before the First World War. The text of this new edition is based on Lawrence's manuscripts, typescripts and corrected proofs, and is the first to remove the corruptions introduced by copyists, typists and printers. The introduction sets out the history of each story and of the collection itself. There is a textual apparatus recording variant readings and full notes explain historical references and other allusions, dialect forms and foreign words. Two important appendixes print the earliest surviving fragment of 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' and the 1911 version of 'Daughters of the Vicar'.

The Cambridge edition of The Lost Girl uses the manuscript which D. H. Lawrence wrote in Sicily in 1920 to recapture his direct relationship with the text, and in particular to recover the characteristically fluent punctuation which the novel's original printers obscured or ignored. The edition prints all four of the passages which the publisher censored without Lawrence's full knowledge and the hero's name is correctly spelled for the first time in an English edition. The novel is set mainly in the Eastwood of Lawrence's youth, the full annotation identifies a great many real-life characters and settings. John Worthen's introduction gives an accurate account of The Lost Girl's development, composition and publication, and the influence upon the book of Lawrence's desire to write a commercially successful novel. The textual apparatus records all variant readings.

Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories gathers together all of Lawrence's short stories not collected in the Prussian Officer volume. It offers a range of work from Lawrence's earliest surviving published story, 'A Prelude', to 'New Eve and Old Adam' written at the height of his early maturity in 1913. Each story in this edition appears in a new, authoritative text based on the manuscripts, typescripts, corrected proofs and early printings drawn from libraries and private collections in England, Italy and America. All the stories have thus been stripped of the layers of errors introduced by typists, editors and printers in their previous publication. John Worthen's introduction sets out the composition and publication history of each story, and gives a full account of the context in which it was created. A textual apparatus records all variant readings and explanatory notes explain allusions, dialect forms and foreign words.

The First 'Women in Love' is one of Lawrence's greatest works, and is the only full length work of fiction which he completed between The Rainbow and the extensively revised Women in Love. It is a piece of fiction generated in the England, and the Europe, of the First World War. Publishers were alarmed by the fate of his previous novel The Rainbow and The First 'Women in Love' was rejected by every publisher who saw it. As a result it is a novel whose very existence as an independent text has been ignored, and which has not been published until now. The First 'Women in Love' shares much of its material with Women in Love, but its central relationships are dissimilar, and the ending radically different.

The first volume of the three-volume Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence was originally published in 1991, and draws on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, many of them hitherto unpublished, to reveal a complex portrait of an extraordinary man. It describes his upbringing in a small colliery town in Nottinghamshire, his years spent as a teacher and his disastrous sexual experiments with Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke and Alice Dax, as well as providing a radical account of his early relationship with Frieda Weekley, Lawrence's 'woman of a life-time'. It ends with the completion of his great autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. This volume has already established itself as the most complete and authoritative account available.

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of D. H. Lawrence's writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19; but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and the complete surviving text of the essays of the English Review period, as well as a host of other materials, including four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman.

Lawrence's genius is unquestioned, but he is seldom considered a writer interested in comedy. This 1996 collection of essays by distinguished scholars explores the range, scope and sheer verve of Lawrence's comic writing. Comedy for Lawrence was not, as his contemporary Freud insisted, a mere defence mechanism. The comic mode enabled him to function parodically to undermine radically those forms of authority from which he always felt estranged. Lawrence's critique of the modern failure of the mystic impulse is present in all the comic moments in his writing where it is used to create an alternative cultural and social space. Lawrence used humour to distance himself from the dominant orthodoxy surrounding him, from the material of his fiction, from his readers, and, finally, from his own often intensely serious preoccupations. This book revises the popular image of Lawrence as a humourless writer and reveals his strategic use of a genuine comic talent.

Author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel', and co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great writers and thinkers of the Romantic revolution. This innovative introduction discusses his interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks, as well as his poems, his literary criticism and his biography. John Worthen presents a range of readings of Coleridge's work, along with biographical context and historical background. Discussion of Coleridge's notebooks alongside his poems illuminates this rich material and finds it a way into his creativity. Readers are invited to see Coleridge as an immensely self-aware, witty and charismatic writer who, although damaged by an opium habit, responded to and in his turn influenced the literary, political, religious and scientific thinking of his time.

Author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel', and co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great writers and thinkers of the Romantic revolution. This innovative introduction discusses his interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks, as well as his poems, his literary criticism and his biography. John Worthen presents a range of readings of Coleridge's work, along with biographical context and historical background. Discussion of Coleridge's notebooks alongside his poems illuminates this rich material and finds it a way into his creativity. Readers are invited to see Coleridge as an immensely self-aware, witty and charismatic writer who, although damaged by an opium habit, responded to and in his turn influenced the literary, political, religious and scientific thinking of his time.

This volume collects together the introductions and reviews for which D. H. Lawrence was responsible over the whole duration of his writing career, from 1911 to 1930: it includes the book review which was the last thing he ever wrote, in the Ad Astra Sanatorium in Vence. The forty-nine separate items include some of his most compelling literary productions: for example, the fascinating Memoir of Maurice Magnus of 1921-2, his only extended piece of biographical writing. The volume's Introduction not only outlines the literary contacts of Lawrence's career which led him to doing such work, but gives a fresh account of the life of a literary professional who regularly wrote in support of work in which he personally believed, and who also (rather surprisingly) wrote reviews of nearly thirty books. All the texts, including a number previously unpublished in Britain, have been edited and are supplied with extensive explanatory notes.

An enquiry into the transformations in Lawrence's life and writing which took place between 1913 and 1917.Set alongside his relationship with Frieda Weekley, as revealed by letters and memoirs, his writing (like the first version of Women in Love) shows a Lawrence bedevilled by conflicts within and without: in his marriage to Frieda and because of the start of the First World War, in 1914; by the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915; and during his time in Cornwall with Frieda, Mansfield and Murry in 1916. Worthen shows how Murry's biographical accounts of Lawrence are not as trustworthy as previous biographies assume; he also probes the evidence for Lawrence's now-notorious assault on Frieda in 1916, arguing that Mansfield's letters reveal a very different reality. The book concludes with the breakdown of Lawrence's friendships with Mansfield and Murry and a reading of his 1918-21 novel Aaron's Rod, with which the sun sets on love and marriage as a major theme in his work. Here Love Ends, indeed.

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of D. H. Lawrence's writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19; but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and the complete surviving text of the essays of the English Review period, as well as a host of other materials, including four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman.

This volume collects together the introductions and reviews for which D. H. Lawrence was responsible over the whole duration of his writing career, from 1911 to 1930: it includes the book review which was the last thing he ever wrote, in the Ad Astra Sanatorium in Vence. The forty-nine separate items include some of his most compelling literary productions: for example, the fascinating Memoir of Maurice Magnus of 1921-2, his only extended piece of biographical writing. The volume's Introduction not only outlines the literary contacts of Lawrence's career which led him to doing such work, but gives a fresh account of the life of a literary professional who regularly wrote in support of work in which he personally believed, and who also (rather surprisingly) wrote reviews of nearly thirty books. All the texts, including a number previously unpublished in Britain, have been edited and are supplied with extensive explanatory notes.

This first complete edition of Lawrence's plays contains eight full-length plays and two fragments. Six of the plays - A Collier's Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, The Merry-go-Round, The Married Man, The Fight for Barbara and The Daughter-in-Law - were written between 1909 and 1913, the period when Lawrence was establishing himself as a writer. They are arguably among his very best early work. Yet Lawrence never saw a play of his own on the stage. Only two were performed in his lifetime, and only three were published: the play often regarded as his best, The Daughter-in-Law, remaining unpublished until 1965. Up to now, the plays have existed only in faulty or incomplete texts; this edition, drawn from Lawrence's own surviving manuscripts and typescripts, makes it possible for the first time to read and to stage Lawrence's plays as he wrote them. Published in two volumes.

Drawing especially on the many scholarly discoveries of recent years, this biography examines the life – and death ‒ of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Based on sceptical historical investigation and featuring an in-depth look at Shelley’s personal, financial and familial situation, it builds a compelling narrative about a controversial writer and thinker whose personal and philosophical convictions caused much turmoil during his short yet extraordinarily influential life.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals sides of the author not often studied. It looks at Shelley as an intensely loving, thoughtful and responsible man and father, who (except in one case) took exemplary care of the women he loved and who fell in love with him. It shows how significant his status as a gentleman was; it examines his poetry, letters, notebooks  and discursive prose so that readers can comprehend the most important concerns of his life; it explores the financial and medical grounds for his years of exile; it is also the first biography to take account of his  recently discovered early long poem  the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things.

This biography offers readers a unique look at a famous poet, scholar, gentleman, democrat, atheist and tragic icon of English Romanticism.

Drawing especially on the many scholarly discoveries of recent years, this biography examines the life – and death ‒ of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Based on sceptical historical investigation and featuring an in-depth look at Shelley’s personal, financial and familial situation, it builds a compelling narrative about a controversial writer and thinker whose personal and philosophical convictions caused much turmoil during his short yet extraordinarily influential life.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals sides of the author not often studied. It looks at Shelley as an intensely loving, thoughtful and responsible man and father, who (except in one case) took exemplary care of the women he loved and who fell in love with him. It shows how significant his status as a gentleman was; it examines his poetry, letters, notebooks  and discursive prose so that readers can comprehend the most important concerns of his life; it explores the financial and medical grounds for his years of exile; it is also the first biography to take account of his  recently discovered early long poem  the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things.

This biography offers readers a unique look at a famous poet, scholar, gentleman, democrat, atheist and tragic icon of English Romanticism.