The Complete Novels of D. H. Lawrence 11 Volume Paperback Set
11 total works
D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love - 'the beginning of a new world', as he called it - suffered in the course of its revision, transcription, and publication some of the most spectacular damage ever inflicted upon one of his books. Until now no text of Women in Love has ever been published which is faithful to all of Lawrence's revisions. This edition, edited by scholars in England and America, clears the text of literally thousands of accumulated errors allowing its readers to read and understand the novelist's work as he himself created it. The edition includes the 'Foreword' Lawrence wrote in 1919 and two preliminary and discarded chapters which have attracted widespread critical and biographical discussion. The introduction gives a full history of the novel's composition, revision, publication and reception, and notes explain allusions and references; the textual apparatus records all variants between the base-text and the first printed editions.
Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock was begun in 1906, rewritten three times, and published in 1911. The Cambridge edition uses the final manuscript as base-text, and faithfully recovers Lawrence's words and punctuation from the layers of publishers' house-styling and their errors; original passages, changed for censorship reasons, are reinstated. Andrew Robertson's introduction sets out the history of Lawrence's writing and revision, and the generally favourable reception by friends and reviewers. Lawrence incorporated much of his own experience and reading on to the novel which is set just north-east of Eastwood, and modelled characters on his friends and family. The notes identify real-life places and people, explain dialect forms, literary allusions, and historical references, and include sensitive passages deleted before publication. The textual apparatus records all the variant readings and the appendix prints the two surviving fragments from the earliest manuscripts of the novel, then entitled 'Laetitia'.
The Cambridge edition of The Lost Girl uses the manuscript which D. H. Lawrence wrote in Sicily in 1920 to recapture his direct relationship with the text, and in particular to recover the characteristically fluent punctuation which the novel's original printers obscured or ignored. The edition prints all four of the passages which the publisher censored without Lawrence's full knowledge and the hero's name is correctly spelled for the first time in an English edition. The novel is set mainly in the Eastwood of Lawrence's youth, the full annotation identifies a great many real-life characters and settings. John Worthen's introduction gives an accurate account of The Lost Girl's development, composition and publication, and the influence upon the book of Lawrence's desire to write a commercially successful novel. The textual apparatus records all variant readings.
D. H. Lawrence's second novel The Trespasser is based on the tragic love affair of his friend Helen Corke and her violin teacher. After reading Miss Corke's diary, Lawrence first urged her to write her story and then received her permission to do it himself. Between his rapid composition of the first draft in the spring and summer of 1910 and his final revisions in early 1912, Lawrence's view of Helen Corke, and consequently of her story, changed. The manuscript survives, and this edition presents the text for the first time as Lawrence wrote it, restoring his sentence-structure and punctuation and correcting numerous typesetters' errors. In her substantial introduction Elizabeth Mansfield explores the background of the novel, presents the complications of the publishing history and the novel's reception. A full textual apparatus records the history of the text and the editor annotates topical and other references.
Lawrence called Aaron's Rod 'the last of my serious English novels - the end of The Rainbow, Women in Love line.' Written in the years following the First World War, Aaron's Rod questions many of the accepted social and political institutions of Lawrence's own generation and raises issues still important in our time. Aaron's Rod, completed in 1921,was censored by both Lawrence's American and English publishers. The Cambridge Edition of the novel, based on the only authoritative surviving typescript, restores these cut passages and eliminates the errors and house-styling of previous editions. The volume contains an introduction setting out the genesis of the novel, its transmission, publishing history and reception, as well as explanatory notes and a textual apparatus. The appendix contains some early cancelled passages from the novel, here published for the first time, which reveal the kinds of conceptual and stylistic changes that often occurred in Lawrence's revisions.
Richard and Harriett Somers leave exhausted post-war Europe in search of a new and freer world. White Australia is given an aboriginal critique. This edition is the Seltzer edition, and includes Lawrence's corrections that were not included in previous editions of this work.
The Plumed Serpent is set in Mexico in the 1920s, an era of political turmoil, and centres on a revolutionary movement to revive the religion of the ancient Aztecs. The brilliant vision of place, the violent action and the rituals and myth for the new religion all combine to make it one of Lawrence's most vivid novels. The Cambridge edition establishes for the first time a meticulously edited text based on the manuscript, typescript and proof material, nearly all of which survives. Several lengthy passages rejected in the course of composition and here included in the textual apparatus offer a close look at the intricacies of Lawrence's progress toward a final conception of the novel. Full annotation and appendixes on Mexican politics and Aztec religion are also provided to assist in comprehending the often arcane concepts to which Lawrence applied his imaginative power.
Mr Noon is a sardonic tale about the amorous adventures of Gilbert Noon, a young schoolmaster in Lawrence's home county of Nottinghamshire who gets entangled with a girl, loses his job, and decides to leave the country to escape the narrow provincial middle-class morality. It was first known as a long story posthumously published in A Modern Lover (1934) and collected in the volume called Phoenix II (1968). Lawrence in fact wrote a long continuation of the novel, but the manuscript disappeared for many years. The Cambridge edition brought the two parts together for the first time. It is like a sequel to Sons and Lovers, but much more straightforwardly autobiographical. The publication of the complete work added a new work of major importance to the canon of a great writer, and was widely hailed as a major literary event.
D. H. Lawrence started 'The Sisters' in March 1913, wrote four different versions and claimed to have discarded 'quite a thousand pages' before completing The Rainbow in May 1915. The novel was suppressed, just over a month after publication, in November 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, and to provide a text as close to that which the author wrote as is now possible. The final manuscript, revisions in the typescript and the first edition are recorded in the full textual apparatus so the reader can follow the development of the novel and evaluate what outside interference might have done to it. Appendixes give the earliest, unpublished fragments from the first two versions and a newly discovered report and summary of the third. Published in two volumes.
Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'
by D H Lawrence
Published 11 March 1993
The Cambridge edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover (and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover') is the first ever to restore to Lawrence's most famous novel the words that he wrote. It removes typists' corruptions and compositors' errors, which have marred the text for over sixty years, and includes hundreds of new words, phrases and sentences - and thousands of changes in punctuation. This text projects the sound of Lawrence's voice, embodies the precision of his mature style and reveals the force of his rhetorical power. The introduction establishes an accurate history of composition, typing, printing, publication and reception; the notes freshly identify dozens of difficult allusions; and the appendix, an original essay, explains how Lawrence imaginatively weaves real places and people into the fictional tapestry that he creates. For students and scholars alike, the Cambridge text is the only text of the novel that can be read or quoted with confidence.
Now printed in full for the first time, Sons and Lovers is D. H. Lawrence's most widely read novel and 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. This edition presents the novel in the form that Lawrence himself wanted - about one tenth longer than the incomplete and expurgated version that has hitherto been available. The introduction of this edition relates much new information about Lawrence's two-year struggle to write his autobiographical masterpiece. The notes document many previously unknown sources, and indicate Lawrence's preoccupation with key contemporary issues such as women's rights, and the impact of evolutionary theory on religion and ethics. Published in two volumes.