A Tribute To D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence,
the son of an illiterate coal miner and a schoolteacher,
was born in the Nottinghamshire village
of Eastwood on Sept. 11, 1885.
He attended Nottingham University, qualified as a teacher in 1908,
and worked in a London school until 1912.
In the same year, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley
(born von Richthofen),
a married woman who left her husband
and three children to live with him.
(Their meeting and their first months together
are described in Part II of Lawrence's
posthumously-published novel Mr. Noon, 1984.)
For Lawrence their marriage (1914) exemplified
many of the concerns of his fiction:
the breaking down of social barriers,
the flouting of moral conventions,
and the conflict between the
psychological and physical needs of men and women.
The stresses of their relationship were portrayed in
his volume of autobiographical verse
Look! We Have Come Through (1917).
Lawrence and his wife left England in 1919,
returning only occasionally for brief visits.
They traveled throughout Europe and
also lived in Australia and New Mexico.
He suffered greatly from the hostility of a prudish public,
who thought of him as a pornographer,
and did not live to enjoy the praise that
his books began to receive in the 1950s.
He died of tuberculosis in France on Mar. 2, 1930.