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Overview
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 of Lady 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 Through intensive research and access to unpublished essays and letters of Lawrence and his circle, Meyers describes the circumstances of his mother's death, the reason for the suppression of The Rainbow, and the author's protean (and extreme) sexuality that mirrored that of his fiction.
The author of a distinguished biography of Ernest Hemingway brings his superb gifts for research and narrative to a writer of comparable importance, whose life was driven toward extremes of passion and violence. Meyers does justice to the English novelist's celebrations of human sexuality and his sometimes scandalous relationships. 16 pages of photographs.
Synopsis
This masterly work offers an exciting recreation of the life and times of British novelist D.H. Lawrence.
Publishers Weekly
In this penetrating profile, Meyers traces a writer who alienated friends, fervidly explored sexuality, restlessly traveled and refused to acknowledge the tuberculosis that claimed his life in 1930. Photos. (May)
Editorials
Christian Science Monitor
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. M. Forster called ' the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation'...the detached elan with which Meyers analyzes and makes familiar the tempestuous-yet -binding relationship [between Lawrence and Frieda] is one of the more engaging aspects of the book. By sketching Frieda's numerous marital infidelities Meyers gives us Lawrence rooted in the human clay of marriage, the ' living man,' the author of great and original literature.The New York Review Of Books
A 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.— Noel Annan