D.H. Lawrence, son of a coal miner and a former schoolteacher, was born in the English Midlands in 1885. Lawrence attended Nottingham High School as a scholarship student and later Nottingham University College, where in 1912 he met and eloped with Frieda von Richthofen, the aristocratic German wife of one of his teachers. In 1913 he published his great autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, and began work on a long novel with a female protagonist, to be called The Sisters. Eventually this project split in two. The first half, now called The Rainbow, was published in 1915, and immediately suppressed for obscenity. The second half, Women in Love, was rewritten between 1915 and 1917, during World War I—a period of intense bitterness in Lawrence’s life. Because of the fate of The Rainbow, and because of the threat of libel suits, Women in Love was first published privately in the United States in 1920, and only later published in England. After the war Lawrence and Frieda wandered the world, searching for a congenial culture and a climate that would be favorable to Lawrence’s tuberculosis. Lawrence died in Vence, France, in 1930.
