D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912: Volume 1: The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence [Hardcover]

Professor John Worthen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 28, 1991 | Series: Cambridge Biography (Book 1)

This first volume of the three-volume Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence draws on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, many of them previously unpublished, to reveal a complex portrait of an extraordinary man. It describes his upbringing in a small colliery town in Nottinghamshire, and the years he spent as a teacher in London before the blossoming of his literary career. It offers new insights into his disastrous sexual experiments with Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke, Louie Burrows and Alice Dax, and provides a radically new account of his early relationship with Frieda Weekley, six years older than he, married and with three children, but to Lawrence the "woman of a lifetime." The volume ends with Lawrence completing his great autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, destined to become one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century. Volume 2 (1912-1922) by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Volume 3 (1922-1930) by David Ellis will be published in late 1992 and early 1994, respectively. John Worthen, the author of D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (1979, Rowman and Littlefield) and D. H. Lawrence: A Literary Life (1989, St. Martin's Press) has edited several of the volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence. ID. H. Lawrence: The Cambridge Biography

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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a mass of newly published Lawrenciana, chiefly letters, and thus, to a degree, renders all the existing biographies out of date.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.

From Library Journal

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 656 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1St Edition edition (June 28, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521254191
• ISBN-13: 978-0521254199
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,749,601 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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