Description

This second volume of the acclaimed Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence covers the years 1912-22, the period in which he forged his reputation as one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. The story opens as the twenty-six-year-old Lawrence travels to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the wife of a university professor and mother of three small children. In his baggage on that prosaic cross-channel ferry was a draft of Sons and Lovers, the first of a group of novels with which Lawrence was to revolutionize English fiction over the next decade. This meticulously researched volume opens a new perspective on the central period of Lawrence's life and literary career. Drawing on memoirs, oral recollections, and unpublished manuscript material, it deals squarely with the vexing issue of Lawrence and Frieda's personal relations--issues that have more often been gossiped about than scrupulously examined. Above all it reveals the triumph of Lawrence's art during a decade of extraordinary trials in which, against all reasonable odds, the coal-miner's son established himself as the most innovative and notorious novelist of his generation.