Lady Chatterley's Lover

by D H Lawrence

Published 1 July 1959
In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence argues for individual regeneration, which can be found only through the relationship between man and woman (and, he asserts sometimes, man and man). Love and personal relationships are the threads that bind this novel together. Lawrence explores a wide range of different types of relationships. The reader sees the brutal, bullying relationship between Mellors and his wife Bertha, who punishes him by preventing his pleasure. There is Tommy Dukes, who has no relationship because he cannot find a woman who he respects intellectually and at the same time finds desirable. There is also the perverse, maternal relationship that ultimately develops between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton after Connie has left. Masterful written, one of the most important novels of all time.

Women in Love

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1954
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.

Lost Girl

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1955
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.

Fantasia of the Unconscious

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1961
English author and literary critic D. H. Lawrence writes in Fantasia of the Unconscious:I am not a proper archaeologist nor an anthropologist nor an ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like Herakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and Frobenius. Even then I only remember hints - and I proceed by intuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass of revolting nonsense, without a qualm.Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life.

Sea and Sardinia

by D H Lawrence

Published 1 January 1921
Written after the First World War when he was living in Sicily, Sea and Sardinia records Lawrence's journey to Sardinia and back in January 1921. It reveals his response to a new landscape and people and his ability to transmute the spirit of place into literary art. Like his other travel writings the book is also a shrewd inquiry into the political and social values of an era which saw the rise of communism and fascism. On one level an indictment of contemporary materialism, Sea and Sardinia is nevertheless an optimistic book, celebrating the creativity of the human spirit and seeking in the fundamental laws which governed human nature in the past fresh inspiration for the present. This 1997 edition restores censored passages and corrects corrupt textual readings to reveal for the first time the book Lawrence himself called 'a marvel of veracity'.

Twilight in Italy

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1956
In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence left England for the first time and travelled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence's deeper wanderings - into philosophy, opinion, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and fragile ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy hover dark spectres: the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I, upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever.

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.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Mornings in Mexico

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1956
Much of D.H. Lawrence's life was defined by his passion for travel and it was those peripatetic wanderings that gave life to some of his greatest novels. In the 1920s, Lawrence travelled several times to Mexico, where he was fascinated by the clash of beauty and brutality, purity and darkness that he observed there. The diverse and evocative essays that make up "Mornings in Mexico" - "Market Day", "Dance of the Sprouting Corn", "The Hopi Snake Dance" - bring to life the elemental simplicity of the Zapotec Indians in Mexico, the intense, dark rhythms of the Indians in the American South West and are brightly adorned with simple and evocative details sharply observed: piles of fruit in a village market, strolls in a courtyard filled with hibiscus and roses, the play of light on an adobe wall. It was during his time in Mexico that Lawrence re-wrote "The Plumed Serpent", which is infused with his own experiences there. The spirited eloquence and beauty of the essays in "Mornings in Mexico" thus illuminate the inspiration behind of one of Lawrence's most loved works and immerse the reader in a portrait of the country like no other.

The Trespasser

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1935
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.

Aaron's Rod

by D H Lawrence and David Herbert Lawrence

Published December 1954
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.

The Rainbow

by D H Lawrence and Peter Jeffrey

Published 1 January 1915
D. H. Lawrence expected The Rainbow to have 'a bit of a fight' before it was accepted, but 'The fight will have to be made, that is all'. It was suppressed, just over a month after publication, in November 1915. The American publisher would make thirteen further cuts and 'dribble out' the book quietly. In 1930 the British government would again consider suppressing a new printing of The Rainbow. Professor Mark Kinkead-Weekes gives the composition history and collates the surviving states of the text to assess the damage done to Lawrence's 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 full in the textual apparatus so the reader can follow the novel's development and evaluate what outside interference may have done to it. Also included are explanatory notes to historical references and allusions, and an interior chronology of the book itself.

Kangaroo

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1955
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

by D H Lawrence

Published 12 September 1955
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.

The Boy in the Bush

by D H Lawrence

Published April 1963
This is the first critical edition of The Boy in the Bush, a novel whose unlikely genesis has been surrounded in mystery and the subject of claim and counter-claim. A systematic study of all the extant textual documents has revealed a process of composition and revision which qualifies the novel to be treated unequivocally as part of the Lawrence canon. At Lawrence's suggestion an Australian nurse and part-time author, Mollie Skinner (whom he had met in 1922), wrote a tale set in late nineteenth-century Western Australia about a newly-arrived young Englishman's reactions to Perth and the outback. Lawrence's complete rewriting converted her production into an ambitious, powerful novel. The reading text here established eliminates all such instances of censorship and strips away the thousands of regularisings and miscopyings introduced by typists and typesetters. Based on Lawrence's autograph manuscript the text meticulously incorporates his subsequent revisions in the typescripts and proofs.

Short Novels

by D H Lawrence

Published December 1956