Lawrence’s first novel was The White Peacock, which launched him as a novelist. In 1912 he met Frieda von Richthofen, Professor Ernest Weekly's wife, and fell in love with her. Frieda left her husband and three children, and they eloped to Bavaria and then continued to Austria, Germany and Italy. The banning of his fourth novel, The Rainbow (1915) created a band of new problems for Lawrence. It began to be very difficult for him to get his novels published. However, he had important patrons and close friends from the literary world, including Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, and Bertrand Russell. During the First World War, Lawrence and his wife were unable to obtain passports and were targets of constant harassment from the authorities. They were accused of spying for the Germans and were officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917. The Lawrences were not permitted to emigrate until 1919. It was then when their years of wandering began. Lawrence's best known work is Lady Chatterley’s Lover, first published privately in Florence in 1928. It tells of the love affair between a wealthy, married woman, and a man who worked on her husband's estate. The book was banned for a time in both the U.K. and U.S. as pornographic. In the U.K. it was published in unexpurgated form in 1960, after an obscenity trial, where defense witnesses included E.M. Forster, Helen Gardner and Richard Hoggart. One of Lawrence's other novels from the 1920’s included Women In Love (1920), a sequel to The Rainbow. He died in 1930.

This was indeed a very brief look over his life and works. One can already begin to link the events in his life to his works and books. We have already decided (well, actually I have already decided, but it’s my article…) that there is a close connection between his life and his works and that he was experimenting with different scenarios, using different variables upon his characters, so that he could observe and analyze the ways they responded to different stimuli. You are welcome to argue--but you must at least read the works first.

One question comes to mind. Why so much sex and sexual tension? One explanation could be that the sexual platform provides for the exploitation of several types of dynamics, and can therefore potentially provide for more observations. A man and a woman being attracted to each other is a basic (sexual) dynamic; however, there are different skins to be applied. In his day, there were rigid social constraints. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there was more than one sin committed. Aside from an adulterous act, what was really outrageous for the time was that someone in Lady Chatterley’s social position was committing adultery with an employee - someone much lower than her on the social scale…And so goes the exponential potential of starting with a base of the sexual dynamic.

I feel compelled to state that D.H.Lawrence’s work is not pornographic. Do not read as such! His novels explore relations between men and women, and he does so in an open manner. After all, he himself said that “Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.” And he had no intention of doing so. Actually, it is human relations, and not particularly sex, that is at the core of his (empirical) doctrine. But sex is an incredible part of it. And it makes for great reading as well.