David Herbert Lawrence, author of a dozen novels, plays, short story collections, collected letters, travel book, and several translations, was notorious when it came to writing. He challenged societal norms and institutions, and wrote openly on topics like sexuality, emotional health, vitality, etc. at a time when England was busy brushing these topics under the carpet. Lawrence had to go through a lot during his lifetime for standing up against all the hostilities that came naturally when one decides to be oneself. An early 20th century writer, he was everything that the then Victorian society was trained not to be.
He travelled extensively throughout Europe and wrote travel notes. His works discussed about the animal instincts of human, he wrote about the class contradictions that occurred within a family and his characters were depicted as raw as it could get. Due to this, his books had to face a lot of rejections and censorship ordeals. He was a working class intellectual who came from the coal mines of Eastwood, nothing else concerned him more than the “Man Alive”. In his works, nature has an important role to play, the way he describes it, creates a foreground for the readers to understand the tone of that particular moment.
“We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen” — Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Works like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover have a deep sense of understanding about the human psyche, and they are counted along with the works of Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce who mastered ‘the stream of consciousness’ technique. Even after death, he couldn’t garner much sympathy from his contemporaries except a few like E.M. Forster and F.R. Leavis, who hailed him as “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”
