DH Lawrence: The Story of A Marriage, Brenda Maddox, c. 1994 -- Outstanding

I just completed the referenced book; absolutely outstanding.

I will go back and re-read some of the first few chapters, to take another look at how this author started out in life.

It will be a great book to go back to, to read those pertinent sections before reading any of his novels.

I did not realize it, but Lady Chatterley's Lover was one of his last novels (his last novel?). It was THE book that did away with the restrictive obscenity laws at the time.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, in contrast is one of Lawrence's inferior works, with neither the structural grandeur and psychological subtlety of The Rainbow and Women in Love, nor the warmth and realism of Sons and Lovers ...
But in its impact on society -- Lawrence's intention, after all -- Lady Chatterley is in a league with the female contraceptive pill, not with a modernist novel. Two legal decisions -- the jury verdict in the celebrated trial in London in 1960, Regina v. Penguin Books, and the federal court order in New York a year earlier which allowed it to be sent through the mails -- virtually abolished literary censorship in Britain and the United States, with repercussions that are still being felt. There are those who consider that hte circulation of a low-priced edition of Constance Chatterley's discovery of the joys of ... to the accompaniment of her gamekeeper's lavish praise for her ..... launched the permissive 1960s all by itself.

This is a great biography; feminists who worship at DH Lawrence's feet need to read it.

"God forbid," Lawrence said late in 1928 (the book was published in 1927) in a letter to Ottoline Morrell, "that I should be taken as urging loose sex activity." But that is how the world took his novel. It was a bomb, not a book.