LAWRENCE, DAVID HERBERT. – English writer, born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, died on 2 March 1930 in Vence. He is among the most representative novelists of his age. The son of a Nottinghamshire miner, his most candid works are perhaps his first partly autobiographical novels: The white peacock (1911) and, above all, Sons and lovers (1913), in which the settings of his adolescence and the harsh life of the miner’s family are admirably represented.
After that, his output was extremely abundant and, although it contains lyrical passages of indisputable value and powerful depictions of natural scenes, it became contaminated by irrationalist and “immoralist” presuppositions and messianic intentions. L.’s pansexualism, a kind of inverted mysticism in which, probably, pathological factors also exerted an influence alongside Freudian theories (the author suffered from tuberculosis, of which he died prematurely), is extensively theorized, with manic fervor, throughout his narrative work and in some genuine treatises. The fanatical exaltation of the sexual instinct and the open war against conventions and, more generally, against everything that is the product of culture and tradition caused scandal, which culminated with the publication of Lady Chatterley's lover (1928), a novel in which sexual experience is attributed absolute value and the protagonist’s adultery is exalted as an act of regeneration and resurrection of mortified senses. In his anxious and feverish search for primitive environments untouched by culture, L. was led into a kind of nomadism, whose stages are represented by travel books, some of them inspired by long stays in Italy. L. also translated Verga and a novella from the Cene by Lasca (1929), and left a series of admirable essays on the American classics (1923). His last book, The man who died, published posthumously in 1931, is a kind of blasphemous myth in which Christ, risen, is imagined as coming to know human love—the mystical reality preached by L. throughout his work—and in which Osiris is generated, or rather reborn, from the union of the man who died and the priestess Isis.