Description
D.H. Lawrence is recognised as one of the greatest novelists of this century. His work is taught in schools and universities all over the world. Yet, thirty years after the failed prosecution of Lady Chatterley's Lover fundamentally changed the moral climate of England, he remains a controversial figure. Regarded by many women during his lifetime as a sexual prophet, in recent years his supposed misogyny has drawn fierce condemnation from feminist critics.
In this new biography of Lawrence, Elaine Feinstein explores his relationships with the women in his own life, many of whom have their counterparts in his novels. She traces the obsessive nature of his love for his mother Lydia; his difficult relationship with his first sweetheart, Jessie Chambers; his pursuit of the bisexual Helen Corke; and the failure of his youthful engagement to Louisa Burrows. She gives a fascinating account of his long, battling marriage to Frieda von Richthofen; his friendships with women writers like Katherine Mansfield and Catherine Carswell; and the attachment to Lawrence of patronesses such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lady Cynthia Asquith and Mabel Dodge Luhan.
Lawrence's Women investigates the paradoxes of Lawrence's personality. He was seen as possessing a rare under- standing of women's sexuality, yet his own sexual relationships were unusually difficult. He put all his faith in the energies of the body, yet his own was frail and sickly. He argued that women needed to submit to men, but he never succeeded in dominating his own wife Frieda.
With a novelist's eye for character and detail, Elaine Feinstein probes the sources of Lawrence's attitudes to women with candour and compassion. Always responsive to the poetry and power of his writing, she gives a fresh and surprising portrait of one of our most misunderstood literary figures.
ISBN:9780002153645
