D.H. Lawrence: A Biography [Paperback]

Jeffrey Meyers, the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Hemingway and George Orwell, offers this masterly work on British novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Meyers' fresh insights into Lawrence's life illuminate Lawrence's working-class childhood, his tempestuous marriage, and his death in France after the scandalous publication ofLady Chatterley's Lover, revealing Lawrence's complex method of intermingling autobiography and fiction. Through intensive research and access to unpublished essays and letters of Lawrence and his circle, Meyers describes the circumstances of his mother's death, the reason for the suppression ofThe Rainbow, and the author's protean (and extreme) sexuality that mirrored that of his fiction.Jeffrey Meyers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the author ofGary Cooper,Scott FitzgeraldandOrwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. He lives in Berkeley, California.This clean, energetic, and untendentious biography of D.H. Lawrence...is most welcome for its candid narrative and new information about the novelist's childhood, marriage, sexual life, health, and always complex friendships. Meyers has produced a readable, scholarly biography that doesn't break its subject on the wheel of some reductive thesis or bury him in self-serving detail. Lawrence livesA fine piece of work. It is dispassionate, it is cool, not cold. It sets out the record and untangles conflicting accounts...Meyers is scrupulous. He hardly ever fails to put the other side's case. He does not whitewash Lawrence...Meyers seems just and wise about Lawrence's feelings for his wife Frieda and hers for him. He seems to understand both, to feel for both.It is a daunting task to record the life of a genius and prophet. Meyers is up to the task. He presents both new material about Lawrence's life as well as a cogent summation of what we already know. His biography is a scholarly, lucid, and comprehensive account of the writer whom E.l“½