Sons And Lovers (Broché)

Biographie de David Herbert Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born into a minces family in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885, the fourth of five children. He attended Beauvale Board School and Nottingham High School, and trained as an elementary schoolteacher at Nottingham University College. He taught in Croydon from 1908. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, just a few weeks after the death of his mother to whom he had been extraordinarily close. His career as a schoolteacher was ended by serious illness at the end of 1911. In 1912 Lawrence went to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of the Professor of Modern Languages at the University College of Nottingham. They were married on their return to England in 1914. Lawrence had published Sons and Lovers in 1913; but The Rainbow, completed in 1915, was suppressed, and for three years he could not find a publisher for Women in Love, completed in 1917. After the war Lawrence lived abroad, and sought a more fulfilling mode of life than he had so far experienced. With Frieda, he lived in Sicily, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico. They returned to Europe in 1925. His last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was published in 1928 but was banned in England and America. In 1930 he died in Vence, in the south of France, at the age of forty-four. Lawrence's life may have been short, but he lived it intensely. He also produced an amazing body of work: novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, translations, paintings and letters (over five thousand of which survive). After his death Frieda wrote, 'What he had seen and felt and known he gave in his writing to his fellow men, the splendour of living, the hope of more and more life ... a heroic and immeasurable gift.' Helen and Carl Baron met and married as research students in Cambridge in the late 1960s. It was Carl Baron's survey of Lawrence's manuscripts and proofs that persuaded CUP to undertake a scholarly edition of Lawrence's works. He became Senior Tutor at St Catharine's College and so Helen Baron, who had completed her Ph.D. on the manuscripts of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42), agreed to undertake the work of editing Sons and Lovers. Their intermittent joint discussion and planning sessions proved good practice for this critical introduction. Carl Baron became Academic Registrar at the University of Hull in 1996 and died in 1997. Helen Baron is now teaching in the English department of the University of Hull and is currently preparing an edition of the unpublished early versions of Sons and Lovers. John Worthen is Advisory Editor for the works of D. H. Lawrence in Penguin. Currently Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham, he has published widely on Lawrence; his acclaimed biography, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, was published in 1991. He has also edited a number of volumes in the authoritative Cambridge Lawrence Edition, whose texts Penguin are reproducing.