by Enzo Sardellaro

Created on: August 05, 2009

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood in 1885, the son of a coal miner of Nottinghamshire and of a ex school-mistress with a flavour for belles-lettres. He itself was for a length of time a preceptor at Croydon, but, on the publication of his first novel, "The White Peacock" (1911), he gave up to teach for belles-lettres. This story is showing a deep vein of pure poetry, but does not own the dept of his later works.

Under the influence of the theories of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Lawrence was persuaded that the puritan education of England accounted for a few evils in the society around himself. His thesis is that the suppression of primordial instincts and the evolvement of cerebral consciousness are the main motifs of much of the wretchedness of man in the civilization today.

The sequence of novels that followed "The White Peacock", "Sons and Lovers" (1913), "The Rainbow (1921, "Aaron's Rod" (1922) and Lady Chatterley's Lowel" (1929), consternated the public for their penetrating analysis of sexual motifs. This last novel, particularly, elicited a thunderstorm of protest for its uninhibited language and wealth of physical details, and only in 1960 was it printed in Great Britain in the original, unexpurgated form.

During his extensive travels, Lawrence went in search of a primitive society, where unconscious instinct was not overpowered by conscious reasoning. "The plumed serpent" (1926) gives indications of his experience during a excursion in Mexico and his sympathies for peoples unaffected by culture. Lawrence also composed essays, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious" (1922), and "Fantasia of the Unconscious", which are a great importance for to understand his fiction. Lawrence's poetry in often a short-cut in order to the comprehension of his novels.

Very important was the years after 1911, when he ended his relationship with Jessie Chambers, whom he had acquainted himself with in 1901, and who was the pattern for the character of Miriam in his autobiographical novel "Sons and Lovers". In 1912 Lawrence run off to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the German wife. In 1914 Lawrence and Frieda returned in England, and they go married. "The rainbow "(1915) was banned for obscenity, a problem which was to afflict Lawrence for the rest of his life.

After the war, in 1919, Lawrence and his wife tired themselves of England, started to tour around the world. After to spend awhile in Italy, he travelled by Ceylon, Australia , North America and Mexico, where he rest for a term. His travels were the inspiration for many of his later books, from "The plumed serpent" up to "Morning in Mexico" (1927). In Mexico was discovered that he was ill with tuberculosis and returned to Italy, where he lived near Florence and finished "Lady Chatterly's Lovers", considered obscene for a long while. Lawrence expired in France, in 1930.

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