The first volume of the Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence presents a detailed and nuanced portrait of the author, utilizing a diverse array of documentary and oral sources, many of which are previously unpublished. This comprehensive exploration delves into Lawrence's life and character, setting the stage for the subsequent volumes that will continue to unravel his complexities. The biography is enhanced by 50 halftone illustrations that provide visual context to his story.
This book offers an insightful exploration of a prominent figure in Romantic literature, highlighting their influential writings and philosophical ideas. It delves into the themes and historical context that shaped their work, providing students with a comprehensive understanding of their contributions to literature and thought. Through engaging analysis, readers will appreciate the depth and impact of this writer's legacy in the Romantic era.
A portrait of one of the 20th century's, most radical and misunderstood writers. This book follows Lawrence, from his awkward youth in Nottinghamshire, through his turbulent relationship with Frieda, and the years of exile abroad to his premature death at the age of 44. It is a reappraisal of a man, who believed himself to be an outsider
This candid, intimate, and compellingly written new biography offers a fresh account of Robert Schumann’s life. It confronts the traditional perception of the doom-laden Romantic, forced by depression into a life of helpless, poignant sadness. John Worthen’s scrupulous attention to the original sources reveals Schumann to have been an astute, witty, articulate, and immensely determined individual, who—with little support from his family and friends in provincial Saxony—painstakingly taught himself his craft as a musician, overcame problem after problem in his professional life, and married the woman he loved after a tremendous battle with her father. Schumann was neither manic depressive nor schizophrenic, although he struggled with mental illness. He worked prodigiously hard to develop his range of musical styles and to earn his living, only to be struck down, at the age of forty-four, by a vile and incurable disease. Worthen’s biography effectively de-mystifies a figure frequently regarded as a Romantic enigma. It frees Schumann from 150 years of mythmaking and unjustified psychological speculation. It reveals him, for the first time, as a brilliant, passionate, resolute musician and a thoroughly creative human being, the composer of arguably the best music of his generation.
A biography of T S Eliot that offers a sympathetic study of his first marriage
which does not attempt to blame, but to understand; it shows how Eliot's
poetry can be read for its revelations about his inner world.
In John Worthen's revelatory biography, Marten emerges from the shadows as a
brilliantly clever, lively-minded man, free of fundamentalist zeal so common
in many of his republican contemporaries.
"Seen by Lawrence as his most accomplished book, but subject to the initial prudery and incomprehension that met most of his fiction, Women in Love examines the regenerative and destructive aspects of human passion, as illustrated by its depiction of Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen - who first appeared in The Rainbow - and their relationships with Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin. Set against the backdrop of a world consuming itself in war, the novel creates an instructive vision of humanity's dance with life and death." "This text is the famous "first" Women in Love, the unexpurgated version preferred by Lawrence himself, which was rejected by every publisher because of the banning of The Rainbow in 1915. More positive in tone than the revised version published in his lifetime, with different central relationships and a radically different ending, it is now viewed by many as Lawrence's masterpiece."--BOOK JACKET.
This collection of short pieces (mostly unpublished, mostly lectures) represents work done between 1994 and 2008 by John Worthen, now Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham and its Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 1994-2003. They range between his research into the manuscript of D. H. Lawrence's story "New Eve and Old Adam" in Tulsa, to his farewell lecture ("Ways of Saying Goodbye") at the University of Nottingham. Brief introductions recall the original occasions when the pieces were written or given as lectures; they recall John Worthen's underlying interest in the biographical and the tangible.
John Worthen's mordantly humorous novel is grounded in reality: it is wholly fictional, but deeply rooted in the lives of real people. All accounts of the life of Frieda von Richthofen Weekley Lawrence Ravagli - best known as the wife of the writer D. H. Lawrence, and one of the models for his Lady Chatterley novel ‒ are hopelessly flawed by the impossibility of understanding her first marriage, to Professor Ernest Weekley. Readers of this novel will discover what Weekley was like as he grew up, how much he loved Frieda, how she felt about him, how she managed to carry on her marriage for thirteen years, how and why she turned to D. H. Lawrence, how she lost her three children to Weekley: and, incidentally, how much Weekley hated Lawrence. These are all here stylishly accounted for by Worthen's back-to-back, fictional, first-person narratives, which take the reader deep inside Weekley's point of view, and comprehensively inside Frieda's: into his rage and bafflement and into her unrepressed anger. At least one tragic history results, and one passionate love story: but whose is which?
This book is an endeavour to provide the reader with a general outline of Lawrence's writing career. It is also an account of the manner in which he made his way financially as a writer from the start of his career to the printing of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in 1928.
