"Lawrence who had been perceived as a guru of sexual liberation became," as Peter Widdowson puts it, "the phallocratic oppressor of gender politics."
Of course, many readers and critics remain willing to consider Lawrence more dispassionately and to appreciate the unique nature of his work within the context of his times. Lawrence remains best known for his novels, and his stories reveal much about the aesthetic values and philosophical assumptions that inform his longer fiction. But those stories, widely studied and frequently anthologized, are interesting in their own right. They have long been admired for their subtlety, intensity, and striking individuality.
Lawrence was born in Eastwood, a mining village located within ten miles of Nottingham, and--as he would later recall--"one mile from the small stream, the Erewash, which divides Nottinghamshire from Derbyshire." Lawrence thus spent his childhood in an area that was, he wrote, "a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George Eliot." The fabled Sherwood forest was close by. "To me, as a child and a young man," wrote Lawrence in "Nottingham and the Mining Countryside," this was "the old England of the forest and agricultural past; there were no motor-cars, the mines were, in a sense, an accident in the landscape, and Robin Hood and his merry men were not very far away."
Lawrence's father was a miner's butty--a foreman of sorts--in one of Eastwood's pits.
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