D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 - John Worthen

The first volume of the three-volume Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence was originally published in 1991, and draws on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, many of them hitherto unpublished, to reveal a complex portrait of an extraordinary man. It describes his upbringing in a small colliery town in Nottinghamshire, his years spent as a teacher and his disastrous sexual experiments with Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke and Alice Dax, as well as providing a radical account of his early relationship with Frieda Weekley, Lawrence's 'woman of a life-time'. It ends with the completion of his great autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. This volume has already established itself as the most complete and authoritative account available.