Lawrence, D.H.

Lady Chatterley's Lover: Cambridge Lawrence Edition (Penguin Classics)

Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter--the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married woman and the game keeper who works for the estate owned by her wheelchaired husband. Now that we're used to reading about sex, and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterful and lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the world of its characters.

The great philosopherÂ’s final writings on the real and the ideal

In Timaeus and Critias, Plato presents his ultimate view on the composition of the universe. Taking the form of dialogues among Socrates, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates, these two works explore the origins of the universe, life, and humanity, and have remained a paradigm of science for two thousand years. Desmond LeeÂ’s translation preserves the lucidity of the original, and his appendix on Atlantis is an invaluable source of information on this perennial myth. Timaeus and Critias is an essential text for students of philosophy and classics as well as literature and mythology.

The Cambridge edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover is the first ever to restore to Lawrence's most famous novel the words that he wrote. Removing corruptions and errors and including hundreds of new words, phrases and sentences - this is the only text that can be read or quoted with confidence.

Sons and Lovers (Modern Library Classics)

Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was a son more indentured to his mother's love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H. Lawrence's young protagonist. Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his 1913 novel he grappled with the discordant loves that haunted him all his life--for his spiritual childhood sweetheart, here called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence's own account, a book aimed at depicting this woman's grasp: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives."

Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early, which further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her psychological snare is immense. She loathes Paul's Miriam from the start, understanding that the girl's deep love of her son will oust her: "She's not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him." Meanwhile, Paul plays his part with equal fervor, incapable of committing himself in either direction: "Why did his mother sit at home and suffer?... And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her--and he easily hated her." Soon thereafter he even confesses to his mother: "I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you."

The result of all this is that Paul throws Miriam over for a married suffragette, Clara Dawes, who fulfills the sexual component of his ascent to manhood but leaves him, as ever, without a complete relationship to challenge his love for his mother. As Paul voyages from the working-class mining world to the spheres of commerce and art (he has fair success as a painter), he accepts that his own achievements must be equally his mother's. "There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with promise. She was to see herself fulfilled... All his work was hers."

The cycles of Paul's relationships with these three women are terrifying at times, and Lawrence does nothing to dim their intensity. Nor does he shirk in his vivid, sensuous descriptions of the landscape that offers up its blossoms and beasts and "shimmeriness" to Paul's sensitive spirit. Sons and Lovers lays fully bare the souls of men and earth. Few books tell such whole, complicated truths about the permutations of love as resolutely without resolution. It's nothing short of searing to be brushed by humanity in this manner. --Melanie Rehak

With a new Introduction by Geoff Dyer
Commentary by Anthony Burgess, Jessie Chambers, Frieda Lawrence, V.S. Pritchett, Kate Millett, and Alfred Kazin

Of all Lawrence's work, Sons and Lovers tells us most about the emotional source of his ideas," observed Diana Trilling. "The famous Lawrence theme of the struggle for sexual power--and he is sure that all the struggles of civilized life have their root in this primary contest--is the constantly elaborated statement of the fierce battle which tore Lawrence's family."

Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. When it appeared in 1913, it was immediately recognized as the first great modern restatement of the oedipal drama, and it is now widely considered the major work of D. H. Lawrence's early period. This intensely autobiographical novel recounts the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict. The author's vivid evocation of the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction makes this one of his most powerful novels.

For the critic Kate Millett, "Sons and Lovers is a great novel because it has the ring of something written from deeply felt experience. The past remembered, it conveys more of Lawrence's own knowledge of life than anything else he wrote. His other novels appear somehow artificial beside it."

Now printed in full for the first time, Sons and Lovers is one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. In 1913, at the time of its first publication, Lawrence reluctantly agreed to the removal of no fewer than eighty passages which until now have never been restored.

Women in Love / Cambridge Lawrence Edition (Penguin Classics)

Two of D. H. Lawrence’s most renowned novels—now with new packages and new introductions

Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence’s greatest novel, Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of the Brangwens. Focusing on Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun’s relationships—the former with a school inspector and the latter with an industrialist and then a sculptor—Women in Love is a powerful, sexually explicit depiction of the destructiveness of human relations.

This edition of Women in Love clears the text of literally thousands of accumulated errors allowing its readers to read and understand the novelist's work as Lawrence himself created it. The introduction gives a full history of the novel's composition, revision, publication and reception, and notes explain allusions and references.

Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

This collection includes all the poems from the incomplete "Collected Poems" of 1929 and from the separate smaller volumes issued during Lawrence's lifetime; uncollected poems; an appendix of juvenilia and another containing variants and early drafts; and all Lawrence's critical introductions to his poems. It also includes full textual and explanatory notes.

Selected Shorts: Timeless Classics (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story)

Studies in Classic American Literature (Twentieth Century Classics)

Lawrence asserted that 'the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it'. In these highly individual, penetrating essays he has exposed 'the American whole soul' within some of that continent's major works of literature. In seeking to establish the status of writings by such authors as Poe, Melville, Fenimore Cooper and Whitman, Lawrence himself has created a classic work. "Studies in Classic American Literature" is valuable not only for the light it sheds on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American consciousness, telling 'the truth of the day', but also as a prime example of Lawrence's learning, passion and integrity of judgement.

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923 and long out of print, provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, as well as earlier, often very different, versions of many of the essays, and a host of other materials, including four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman.

Little Novels of Sicily

FIRST PUBLISHED in a single volume in 1883, the stories collected in Little Novels of Sicily are drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood, reported at the time to be the poorest place in Europe. Verga's style is swift, sure, and implacable; he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath, and tells them with a stark economy of words. There's something dark and tightly coiled at the heart of each story, an ironic, bitter resolution that is belied by the deceptive simplicity of Verga's prose, and Verga strikes just when the reader's not expecting it.

Translator D. H. Lawrence surely found echoes of his own upbringing in Verga's sketches of Sicilian life: the class struggle between property owners and tenants, the relationship between men and the land, and the unsentimental, sometimes startlingly lyric evocation of the landscape. Just as Lawrence veers between loving and despising the industrial North and its people, so too Verga shifts between affection for and ironic detachment from the superstitious, uneducated, downtrodden working poor of Sicily. If Verga reserves pity for anyone or anything, it is the children and the animals, but he doesn't spare them. In his experience, it is the innocents who suffer first and last and always.

"The Little Novels of Sicily have that sense of the wholeness of life, the spare exuberance, the endless inflections and overtones, and the magnificent and thrilling vitality of major literature."-- The New York Times

"In these stories the whole Sicily of the 1860s lives before us . . . and whether his subject be the brutal bloodshed of an abortive revolution or the simple human comedy that can attend even deep mourning, Verga never loses his complete artistic mastery of his material."-- The Times Literary Supplement

The Rainbow (Oxford World's Classics)

In The Rainbow (1915) Lawrence challenged the customary limitations of language and convention to carry into the structures of his prose the fascination with boundaries and space that characterize the entire novel. Condemned and suppressed on first publication for its open treatment of sexuality and its "unpatriotic" spirit, the novel chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England.

D. H. Lawrence started 'The Sisters' in 1913, wrote four different versions and claimed to have discarded 'quite a thousand pages' before completing The Rainbow in 1915. Mark Kinkead-Weekes gives the composition history and collates the surviving states of the text to assess the damage done to Lawrence's great novel.

Sons and Lovers (Signet Classics)

D.H. Lawrence paints a portrait of an artist torn between affection for his mother and desire for two young beauties. Set in the coalfields of Lawrence's youth, the story follows Paul Morel's growth into manhood in a British working-class family.

Sons and Lovers (Penguin Classics)

Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence, and the price of family bonds. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude Morel devotes her life to her sons. But conflict is inevitable when Paul seeks relationships with women to escape the suffocating grasp of his mother. As profoundly affecting today as it was nearly a century ago, this is the peerless Lawrence at his most personal.
* Includes a new introduction, chronology, and further reading