David Herbert Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire in 1885. His
first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. The next
year Lawrence published Sons and Lovers and ran off to Germany with
Frieda Weekley, his former tutor's wife. His masterpieces The
Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but
the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not
published until 1920. Lawrence's lyrical writings challenged
convention, promoting a return to an ideal of nature where sex is
seen as a sacrament. In 1925 Lawrence's final novel, Lady
Chatterly's Lover, was banned in England and the United States for
indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice.
James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen
College, Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has
worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war
correspondence, foreign correspondent and columnist. He is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of
Poetry for the period 1994-99.
" Lawrence's gifts were phenomenal, and there is no one in English
literature to touch him, at his best."
-Doris Lessing
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