D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence uses the story of a storm and the deaths it causes to revive the feelings for (if not an actual belief in) the old gods, in this case Mercury whose shrine is ignored by the tourists but who takes his revenge...

A Classic Pair: Tess of the D'Urbevilles & Lady Chatterley's Lover brings together two iconic British writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Lady Chatterley's Lover was the subject of one of the most infamous trials of the 20th Century when Penguin were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. However, with expert witnesses for the defence including E.M. Forster, Penguin were acquitted and permitted to publish in 1960. The book...

Sons and Lovers is the moving and explicit account of a young man growing up in a closed mining community. Born into a difficult marriage, Paul Morel is shy, introverted and impressionable. As a young adult he becomes violently caught between the attentions of three women; his influential mother...

"Things" takes a cutting look at two "idealistic" young Americans who travel around Europe in an attempt to give their spoiled lives some meaning, and in the end settle for suburban America, surrounded by their possessions, their "things"...

First published in 1915 and often ranked as one of the best novels of the twentieth century, The Rainbow is a passionate tale of desire, struggle and the search for personal freedom.

Lawrence wrote three drafts of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ between 1926 and 1928: ‘The First Lady Chatterley’s Lover', this audiobook, ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’ and the final version, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. All three books are published as ebooks and paperbacks by the...

"None of That" concerns itself with the nature of desire. The man in the story is no more than an animal with base instincts but is attractive to women. The woman looks for something deeper with imagination, but in the end is brought down by the more instinctive man. Lawrence again seems to be...

"The Undying Man" is a slightly unfinished piece, drawing its inspiration from Shelley's Frankenstein about the creation of life and the fear of death. It is interesting to speculate where Lawrence would have gone with the story, but the sound of broken glass is the most likely ending...

"The Blue Moccasins" has the charm of looking at some eternal human problems such as unequal marriage, the waning of sexual desire, and a woman who cannot give herself wholly to her husband in a thoroughly English and local setting: the stage of an amateur dramatic society where all the passions...

"The Lovely Lady" is a fine observation of a life - the lovely lady of the title - that thrives by sucking the life out of others. The two victims escape by a somewhat melodramatic and comical means, but in the process destroy the lovely lady and form what will probably be a dull and passionless...

"Mother and Daughter" can be understood as one of Lawrence's diatribes against women. Two women do their best to get along without men, but in the end, as Lawrence always proposed, a woman cannot be fulfilled without a dominant man, however unsuitable he may be...

"Jimmy and the Desperate Woman" tells the improbable story of an intellectual editor persuading a working woman to live with him. We would say now "on the rebound" from a failed marriage, but Lawrence crosses the class divide and poses questions about what makes us attracted to other people. The...

"Sun" is a sensual story of a woman rediscovering her sexuality through the power of the sun. But for the unexpected arrival of her businessman husband, she was ready to give herself to a local peasant, but is finally pulled back to respectability by her husband. But she is free to remain apart...

"Rex" is a riotous story of the turmoil caused in a household by the arrival of a puppy. The setting is similar to the one found in Sons and Lovers, but Lawrence thought this scene deserved the fuller treatment of a short story. The question of the destructive force of unconditional love is left...

In "The Thimble", Lawrence moves to the world of the affluent middle classes, a world to which he perhaps aspired. The story is a touching one of a disfigured husband returning home from the war to a beautiful new wife. The thimble of the story can be seen to represent purposeless, surface...

"The Wilful Woman" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1922. "The Wilful Woman" remained unfinished, and so the tough, spoiled, rich American woman, used to having her own way, does not get the nemesis Lawrence may have had in mind for her. Whether it was the Wordsworthian lessons of nature as she...

"The Princess" of the story is a spoiled, sexless woman who is thrown in with a passionate man whom she takes into her bed and then rejects. This rejection leads to his ultimate death. Lawrence again pleads his case for the necessary domination of woman by man and shows the sterility of a life...

"Adolf" is a charming story of a wild rabbit introduced by the father into a miner's home, to the delight of the children and the despair of the mother. Larger questions of life and death and nature and civilization are touched on with a light hand...

In "Strike Pay", Lawrence returns to the scenes of his boyhood in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. A group of miners, liberated from work by a strike, enjoy a day out, but the hard realities of home life and mothers-in-law await their return. Tinged with good humor and the sense of comradeship among...