The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence 3 Volume Hardback Set: D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912: The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence: Volume 1

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was originally published in 1991, and draws on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, many of them hitherto unpublished, to reveal a complex portrait of an extraordinary man.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.

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), with his fiery life and staggering literary output, continues a step ahead of his biographers. This hefty volume is first in a three-volume study, each by a different author--Mark Kinkead-Weekes and David Ellis will write the last two, slated to appear in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Here Worthen incorporates a mass of newly published Lawrenciana, chiefly letters, and thus, to a degree, renders all the existing biographies out of date. Worthen provides a wealth of information on Lawrence's family background, his coming-of-age in a Midlands mining community, tortuous early relations with women, first ventures into the working world and explosive burst of self-education. The book ends with his liberating elopement with Frieda Weekley and the publication of his autobiographical masterpiece, Sons and Lovers. Worthen ( D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel ) sets the record straight in a thousand little ways, and there emerges a complex genius, ruthless, sensitive and fully alive. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

First installment of an ambitious three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence; to be followed by volume two (1912-1922, by Mark Kinkead-Weekes) and volume three (1922-1930, by David Ellis), set for 1992 and 1994, respectively. The familiar story, highly detailed, takes a fresh edge from new oral material and 2,000 unpublished letters and postcards--as well as from the running comparisons by Lawrence scholar Worthen (Univ. of Swansea, Wales) that distinguish ``the facts'' from Lawrence's several autobiographical essays about his early childhood and young manhood and their glamorizations in his first three novels. Lawrence knocked his collier father and lauded his mother in Sons and Lovers; but in his later 40s, he reversed this view. When writing that novel, he was still under his mother's influence, trying to upgrade her and himself and leave out harsher truths. About himself, in the character of Paul Morel in that tale, he ignored the filthy talk of the girls at the surgical factory where he worked and their attack on him, painted them as well spoken, himself as well adjusted, not a skinny, neurotic, upset puritan. His early writing, disliked by his family, was, Worthen says, ``actually breaking down in himself the barriers to experience which his upbringing had created.'' He could not admit the existence of female pubic hair even at 22. Much text is devoted to the suppressed sexuality of Lawrence's love life, to his hot, overwritten poems, and to love passages in various drafts of his novels as they tie in with four young ladies he tried to rope into bed, and how these ladies mirrored his problems with his dying, then dead, mother. His entrance into London's literary life and publication of his first novel came about easily; then he met sexually liberated Frieda Weekley, six years his senior, who, following their flight from England, made him into the writer he was to be. And what an explosion she was: ``Lawrence had a violent and irritable temper, and Frieda relished a quarrel.'' Acute and absorbing scholarship. (Fifty b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Worthen's biography of Lawrence's early years is the first volume of Cambridge's new three-volume life of Lawrence, each to be written by a different scholar. Worthen takes the young writer through his elopement with Frieda. This is the finest biography of Lawrence ever written. The book draws on an astounding assortment of hitherto unpublished sources (including, for example, letters from Lawrence's mother). It displays a masterful command over myriad materials (including hundreds of letters, numerous memoirs, all of Lawrence's early writings, and all the manuscript versions of these writings). Literary scholars who thought they knew Lawrence and his circle well will be surprised by the subtlety, aptness, and psychological nuance of Worthen's presentation and interpretation. It is as if for the first time we see Lawrence whole. In the bargain this persuasive biography is compulsively good reading from cover to cover. A major event in modern literary studies.
- Keith Cushman, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.