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Selected Poems

From early, rhyming works in Love Poems and Others (1913) to the ground-breaking exploration of free verse in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) the poems of D. H. Lawrence challenged convention and inspired later poets. This volume includes extensive selections from these and other editions, and contains some his most famous poems, such as 'Piano', a nostalgic reflection on lost youth and love for his mother; 'Snake', exploring human fear of the natural world; the short, cutting comment on sexual politics of 'Can't Be Borne'; and the quiet philosophical resignation of 'Basta!'. Using the revised poems, but in the order in which they appeared in their original collections, this selection offers a fresh perspective that reveals an innovative poet who gave voice to his most intense emotions.

From early, rhyming works in Love Poems and Others (1913) to the ground-breaking exploration of free verse in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) the poems of D. H. Lawrence challenged convention and inspired later poets. 
 
This volume includes extensive selections from these and other editions, and contains some his most famous poems, such as 'Piano', a nostalgic reflection on lost youth and love for his mother; 'Snake', exploring human fear of the natural world; the short, cutting comment on sexual politics of 'Can't Be Borne'; and the quiet philosophical resignation of 'Basta!'. Using the revised poems, but in the order in which they appeared in their original collections, this selection offers a fresh perspective that reveals an innovative poet who gave voice to his most intense emotions.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire in 1885. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. The next year Lawrence published Sons and Lovers and ran off to Germany with Frieda Weekley, his former tutor's wife. His masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not published until 1920. Lawrence's lyrical writings challenged convention, promoting a return to an ideal of nature where sex is seen as a sacrament. In 1925 Lawrence's final novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover, was banned in England and the United States for indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice. 
 
 
James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondence, foreign correspondent and columnist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-99.

D. H. Lawrence and Italy

In these impressions of the Italian countryside, Lawrence transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty. Twilight in Italy is a vibrant account of Lawrence's stay among the people of Lake Garda, whose decaying lemon gardens bear witness to the twilight of a way of life centuries old. In Sea and Sardina, Lawrence brings to life the vigorous spontaneity of a society as yet untouched by the deadening effect of industrialization. And Etruscan Places is a beautiful and delicate work of literary art, the record of "a dying man drinking from the founts of a civilization dedicated to life."

In these impressions of the Italian countryside, Lawrence transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty. 
 
Twilight in Italy is a vibrant account of Lawrence's stay among the people of Lake Garda, whose decaying lemon gardens bear witness to the twilight of a way of life centuries old. In Sea and Sardina, Lawrence brings to life the vigorous spontaneity of a society as yet untouched by the deadening effect of industrialization. And Etruscan Places is a beautiful and delicate work of literary art, the record of "a dying man drinking from the founts of a civilization dedicated to life."

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Among his works, Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913, The Rainbow (1915), Women In Love (1920), and many others. 
 
 
Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written twelve novels as well as two non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, and two collections of essays.

The Rainbow

The Rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. The central figure of ursula becomes the focus of Lawrence's examination of relationships and the conflicts they bring, and the inextricable mingling of the physical and the spiritual. Suffused with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail.

With its frank portrayal of human passion and sexual desire, D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow was banned as 'obscene' in Britain shortly after first publication. 
 
Set in the rural Midlands, The Rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow, Lydia Lensky, and adopts her daughter Anna as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupts between them. All are seeking individual fulfilment, but it is Ursula, Anne's spirited daughter, who in her search for self-knowedge, becomes the focus of Lawrence's examination of relationships and the conflicts they bring, and the inextricable mingling of the physical and the spiritual. Suffused with Biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail. 
 
In his introduction James Wood discusses Lawrence's writing style and the tensions and themes of The Rainbow. This Penguin edition reproduces the Cambridge text, which provides a text as close as possible to Lawrence's original. It also includes suggested further reading, a fragment of 'The Sisters II' from his first draft, and chronologies of Lawrence's life and of The Rainbow's Brangwen family. 
 
Edited with an introduction by James Wood. 
 
'A brave and important book, passionate and wildly ambitious' 
Independent on Sunday

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Among his works, Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913, The Rainbow in 1915, Women In Love in 1920), and many others. 
 
 
James Wood is a visiting professor at Harvard. His latest book is The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Cape).

Sons and Lovers

The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers (1913) is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Among his works, Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913, The Rainbow (1915), Women In Love (1920), and many others. 
 
 
Blake Morrison was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, in 1950. His non-fiction books include And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), As If (1997), and Too True (1998), Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002), a collection of essays (and stories). Blake Morrison's first novel, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, a fictional portrait of the 15th-century printer and the inventor of movable type, was published in 2000.

Women in Love

Women in Love is widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel. The novel continues where The Rainbow left off with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, though he gives that up, and Gudrun's with Gerald Crich, an industrialist, and later with a sculptor, Loerke.

Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire. 
 
Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, Women is Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works. 
 
In his introduction Amit Chaudhuri discusses Lawrence's style and imagery. This introduction also includes a chronology of Lawrence's life and work, further reading, notes and appendices containing the original foreword to Women in Love, a fragment of 'The Sisters', 'Prologue' and 'Wedding' chapters from an earlier draft, a map and discussion of the setting and people involved. 
 
With an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. 
 
'His genius was for instant perception and vivid, passionate expression' 
The Times 
 
'His masterpiece ... Lawrence compels us to admit that we live less finely than we should' 
New York Review of Books

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Among his works, Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913, The Rainbow in 1915, Women In Love in 1920, and many others. 
 
 
Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962. He has contributed fiction, poetry and reviews to numerous publications including The Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and Granta magazine. He is editor of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, published in 2001. His most recent book is St. Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005).

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.

Banned and vindicated, condemned and lauded, Lady Chatterley's Lover is D.H. Lawrence's seminal novel of illicit passion and forbidden desire. 
 
Lady Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the Sir Clifford. Paralysed in the First World War, Sir Clifford is unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, and encourages her instead to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to Oliver Mellors, her husband's gamekeeper, with whom she embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find true love with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships. 
 
In her introduction Doris Lessing discusses the influence of Lawrence's sexual politics, his relationship with his wife Frieda and his attitude towards the First World War. Using the complete and restored text of the Cambridge edition, this volume includes a new chronology and further reading by Paul Poplawski and notes by Michael Squires. 
 
Edited with notes by Michael Squires and an introduction by Doris Lessing. 
 
'A brave and important book, passionate and wildly ambitious' 
Independent on Sunday 
 
'A masterpiece' 
Guardian

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Among his works, Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913, The Rainbow (1915), Women In Love (1920), and many others. 
 
 
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Among her major works are: The Golden Notebook (1962), Martha Quest and a proper marriage, The Four-Gated City (1969), The Fifth Child (1988), and Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999).

D. H. Lawrence

Louise Welsh

Sue Wilson

This collection of short stories traces D. H. Lawrence's development as a writer. His early tales often draw on personal experiences, as in 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', a work he described as 'full of my childhood's atmosphere', while the horror of the First World War haunts 'England, My England'. Later stories, such as 'Things', powerfully express his evolving ideas about the duality of our lives. With their complex characters, these stories illuminate emotional lives and, above all, illustrate Lawrence's passionate belief about the destructive forces in modern society and their effect on love. 
 
With an Introduction by Louise Welsh and Notes by Sue Wilson

D. H. Lawrence

Selected Stories

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