New Poems

The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeD.H. Lawrence's magnificent exploration of human sexuality in the days surrounding World War I. 'Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions,' wrote D.H. Lawrence in Women In Love, a masterpiece that heralded the erotic consciousness of the twentieth century. Echoing elements of Lawrence's own life, Women In Love delves into the mysteries between men and women as two couples strive for love against a haunting backdrop of coalmines, factories, and a beleaguered working class.New introduction by Louis Menand.

Written in the years following World War I and set in postwar England and Italy, Aaron's Rod questions many of the accepted social and political institutions of Lawrence's generation, and raises issues as valid for our own time as they were for his. The novel's hero is an Everyman who flees the destruction in England and his failing marriage and who, like Lawrence himself, becomes absorbed in discovering and understanding the nature of the political and religious ideologies that shaped western civilization. Aaron's Rod was completed in 1921 and was censored by both Lawrence's American and English publishers. The Cambridge Edition, 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 that describes the novel's genesis, its transmission, publication history, and reception. Extensive explanatory notes and textual apparatus are also included.

There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. It was Christmas Eve. Also the War was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air. Also there had been another wrangle among the men on the pit-bank that evening. Aaron Sisson was the last man on the little black railway-line climbing the hill home from work. He was late because he had attended a meeting of the men on the bank. He was secretary to the Miners Union for his colliery, and had heard a good deal of silly wrangling that left him nettled.

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are sisters living in The Midlands in England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, school inspector Rupert Birkin and coal-mine heir Gerald Crich, and the four become friends. Ursula and Birkin become involved, and Gudrun and Gerald eventually begin a love affair. All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. At a party at Gerald's estate, Gerald's sister Diana drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of Gerald's youngest sister. Soon Gerald's coal-mine-owning father dies as well, after a long illness. After the funeral, Gerald goes to Gudrun's house and spends the night with her while her parents sleep in another room. Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, becomes stormy.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960. (A private edition was issued by Inky Stephensen's Mandrake Press in 1929).[1] The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an aristocratic woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of (at the time) unprintable words. The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story.[2] Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three different versions.