D H Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider is an illuminating and clear-sighted portrait of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant, radical and misunderstood writers. John Worthen follows Lawrence from his awkward and intense youth in Nottinghamshire, through his turbulent relationship with wife Frieda and the years of exile abroad to his premature death at the age of 44. His account is an intimate and absolutely compelling reappraisal of a man who believed himself to be an outsider, in angry revolt against his class, culture and country, and who was engaged in a furious commitment to his writing and a passionate struggle to live according to his beliefs. ‘excellent biography’ Sunday Times ‘his life of Lawrence - from the author’s romance with his muse Frieda to his early death - is damnably readable’ Sunday Herald D. H. Lawrence biographer, John Worthen tells us about his travels, goals and achievements. Do you have any interesting or unusual research or writing methods? Have you travelled to undertake your work? Any biography of Lawrence means a good deal of travel. I have climbed mountain passes in the Alps on foot, rowed on lakes, walked for miles, tracked down innumerable dwelling houses by asking impertinent questions of passers-by, hunted for demolished railway stations, interviewed old ladies; have always attempted never to describe a landscape I have not seen (or better still, walked) myself. Can you summarize your main goals and major influences during your career? I became a biographer during the 1980s, and slowly realised that it was what I should have been doing as a writer all my life; I’d never been happy as an academic literary critic. One of my reasons for taking early retirement was to give myself more time as a writer. I seem to be setting myself various tasks as a biographer: first the academic biography of part of a life (Lawrence 1991), the biography of members of a group (Coleridge, Wordsworth et al. 2001), the commercial single life (Lawrence 2005), the biography of a musician (Schumann, in progress), the biography of a woman (Frieda Lawrence, in progress). And then perhaps the biography of someone almost unknown; Henry Marten. What do you feel is your most significant achievement in your field? Is there a story/piece of research/publication/idea that you feel has been particularly worthwhile or influential? The 1991 CUP biography of Lawrence was (and is) a landmark study; the first fully comprehensive study of Lawrence as a child and young man, but also the narrative of the start of an extraordinary life. It’s full of original research (all the way from material from school log-books to the reconstruction of poems which had been erased); but it is also (I hope, and I’ve been told) a thoroughly readable book. In it, I learned for the first time that Lawrence was someone who not only (like all writers) talked and wrote his way into his opinions and beliefs; but he tried himself out in his writing, reinvented himself, and to some extent made himself the instinctive, intuitive person he wanted to be, felt he ought to be, and wasn’t.