D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage

This is the first biography on D.H.Lawrence I have read and I enjoyed it very much. Having not read anything else on him I can't say whether it is gossipy or not. I did not get the impression of it being mean spirited but I think she was less kind to Frieda in the second half of the book. I feel the author did a great job of paralleling the author's life and work. Overall, I feel this was a good book for me start to learn about D.H. Lawrence and his amazing albeit short life.

This book won the Whitbread prize in the U.K.-and deservedly so. It is a thoroughly researched, vivid and well written portrait of a brilliant miner's son writing against a death sentence he would never acknowledge-tuberculosis. After assisting the death of his all-important mother, Lawrence was supported by a wife whom he stole from another man (actually, she had him in bed within 20 minutes of meeting him, in her then-husband's house, too.) Freida was highly sexed and also almost compulsively unfaithful to him. They had dreadful fights, but somehow never actually split up. Brings alive the hothouse intellectual atmosphere of the Fabians, Freidians and Edwardian England, and the awful (and for Lawrence personally humiliating) cultural oppression of both Britain and America in the teens and twenties. You also get to travel around the world with the couple-Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Ceylon, Australia, Taos N.M., and Mexico, meeting the famous and infamous as you go. And with many well-chosen excerpts from Lawrence's letters, poetry and novels, you get a level of understanding of where his books came from which is very helpful in appreciating them. And him. I made the mistake of taking this book to Las Vegas. I didn't do any gambling.