Editions

Life with a Capital L

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241344606

  • Length: 512  Pages

  • Dimensions: 181mm x 28mm x 111mm

  • Weight: 317g

  • RRP: £9.99

Life with a Capital L

  • Essays Chosen and Introduced by Geoff Dyer

A brilliantly varied new selection of D. H. Lawrence's essays, chosen and introduced by Geoff Dyer

For D. H. Lawrence the novel was the pinnacle, 'the one bright book of life', yet his non-fiction shows him at his most freewheeling and playful. This is a selection of his essays, on subjects including art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Arranged chronologically to illuminate the patterns of Lawrence's thought over time, and including many little-known pieces, they reveal a writer of enduring freshness and force.

'The greatest writer of this century, and in many things the greatest writer of all times' Philip Larkin

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241344606

  • Length: 512  Pages

  • Dimensions: 181mm x 28mm x 111mm

  • Weight: 317g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • In Life with a Capital L, Geoff Dyer has selected some of [Lawrence's] most fascinating and accessible pieces to tempt new readers. Comedy and humour abound, as does a provocative honesty. [...] There are countless examples in this volume of Lawrence at his poetic best.

    Gerri Kimber, Times Literary Supplement

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About the Author

D H Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born into a miner's family in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, 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 University College, 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 Italy, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico. They returned to Europe in 1925, settling in Italy again, where he finished Lady Chatterley's Lover. This, his last novel, was published in 1928, but did not appear in its complete form in England and America for thirty years. The tuberculosis which had first been diagnosed in Mexico was becoming increasingly serious by this time, and in a last attempt to find a cure Frieda took him to Germany and then France. He died aged forty-four in Vence, in the south of France. After his death, Frieda wrote that '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.' Lawrence's life may have been short, but he lived it intensely. He produced an amazing body of work: novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, translations, paintings and letters (over five thousand of which survive). 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.

D H Lawrence

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