Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [2]
1906 Lawrence enrolls at University College, Nottingham, to get his teacher’s certificate; he leaves after two years.
1909-1910 The English Review publishes several of Lawrence’s poems. His mother, Lydia, dies in December 1910; Lawrence assists her by administering an overdose of morphine.
1911 Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, is published.
1912 Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of Lawrence’s former Nottingham professor Ernest Weekley and cousin of famous aviator Manfred von Richthofen (also known as the “Red Baron”), run away to Germany and Italy. Lawrence’s second novel, The Trespasser, is published.
1913 Rejected at first by Heinemann Publishers, the autobiographical Sons and Lovers is published. Criticized for his graphic depiction of sexual relations, Lawrence defends himself by stating that “whatever the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true.”
1914 World War I breaks out. Lawrence and Frieda marry on July 13. Unable to obtain passports, for the duration of the war they are forced to live in various places in England, including Cornwall and Derbyshire, where they share a house with John Middleton Murry and the writer Katherine Mansfield.
1915 Upon the publication of The Rainbow, Lawrence is prosecuted for his graphic descriptions of sex, and the novel is suppressed. More than 1,000 copies of the book are burned.
1916 Lawrence is introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell, the wife of a liberal member of Parliament, and she becomes one of his most important patrons. Through her, Lawrence forms acquaintanceships with Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, and Bertrand Russell. Lawrence writes Women in Love, the sequel to The Rainbow.
1917 Lawrence and Frieda are suspected of being spies for the Germans.
1919 The Lawrences journey throughout Europe, stopping in Sicily, Sardinia, and Switzerland.
1920 Lawrence publishes The Lost Girl and also publishes Women in Love in New York.
1921 Women in Love is published in London. Movements in European History, Lawrence’s first major nonfiction work, is published, as is his Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.
1922 Aaron’s Rod, a novel that reflects the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on Lawrence, is published. The Lawrences travel to Ceylon and Australia, where Aaron’s Rod is set. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are published.
1923 Lawrence publishes his novel Kangaroo. He and Frieda visit Mexico as well as New York and Los Angeles. Studies in Classic American Literature —in which Lawrence considers Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—is published.
1924-1925 Mabel Dodge Luhan, a New York socialite, gives the Lawrences her Kiowa Ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in return for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s father, Arthur, dies. While visiting Mexico City, Lawrence falls ill with tuberculosis and is forced to return to England.
1925-1926 The Lawrences settle near Florence. Frieda begins an affair with Angelino Ravagli, a former Italian infantry officer whom she will marry in 1950. Lawrence visits his hometown of Eastwood for the last time. The Plumed Serpent, a political novel about Mexico and a revival of its ancient Aztec religion, is published.
1928 Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published; it is banned in the United Kingdom and the United States, creating a great demand for the book.
1929 Lawrence’s Expressionist paintings, for which he gains posthumous renown, are declared obscene and confiscated from an exhibition at London’s Warren Gallery.
1930 Lawrence succumbs to tuberculosis on March 2 in Vence, France. Frieda moves to Kiowa Ranch, New Mexico, where she builds a small memorial chapel that houses Lawrence’s ashes.
1960 An unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published after Penguin Books is acquitted of obscenity charges brought under the Obscene Publications Act. The trial lasts six days; the thirty-five expert witnesses called to testify include E. M. Forster.
INTRODUCTION
The Reinvention of Love
According to theologian and scholar C. S. Lewis, in his book The Allegory of Love, the history of romantic love dates back only to about the year 1000 A.D. Even if Lewis is just referencing the origins of true love as a tradition, it is still quite an extravagant claim. After all, we know from history, earlier literature, and even the Bible that the emotion we call love certainly existed as far back as we can document. Even certain animals, like some birds, mate for life, a fact that cannot be accounted for by reproductive instincts alone. Yet love, as portrayed in classical literature, is a very disruptive emotion, often linked, as it is in Hamlet, with madness. In earlier times, it would have been unthinkable, as it still is in some regions of the world even today, for one to marry just because one claimed to be in love. According to Lewis, the troubadours, medieval poets from southern France and northern Spain and Italy, began the process of validating romantic love. They went from castle to castle serenading the ladies of the place with poems that begged for