D.H. Lawrence biography

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David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885 on the Haggs Farm in the small mining town of Eastwood, England. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, was a coal miner, and his mother, Lydia Lawrence, worked in the lace-making industry to supplement the family income. Lawrence's hardscrabble, working-class upbringing made a strong impression on him and he later wrote extensively about the experience of growing up in a poor mining town. "Whatever I forget," he later said, "I shall not forget the Haggs, a tiny red brick farm on the edge of the wood where I got my first incentive to write." Lawrence's mother was from a middle-class family that had fallen into financial ruin, but not before she had become well educated and a great lover of literature. She instilled in young D.H. Lawrence a love of books and a strong desire to rise above his blue-collar beginnings.

As a child, D.H. Lawrence often struggled to fit in with other boys. He was physically frail and frequently susceptible to illness, a condition exacerbated by the dirty air of a town surrounded by coal pits. He was poor at sports and, unlike nearly every other boy in town, had no desire to follow in his father's footsteps as a miner. However, he was an excellent student and in 1897, at the age of twelve, he became the first boy in Eastwood's history to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. At Nottingham, Lawrence once again struggled to make friends. He often fell ill and grew depressed and lethargic in his studies, graduating in 1901 having made little academic impression. Reflecting back on his childhood, Lawrence said, "If I think of my childhood it is always as if there was a sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal in which we moved and had our being."

In the summer of 1901, Lawrence took a job as a factory clerk for a Nottingham surgical appliances manufacturer called Haywoods. However, that autumn his older brother William suddenly fell ill and died, and in his grief D.H. Lawrence also came down with a bad case of pneumonia. After recovering, he began working as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood, where he met a young woman named Jessie Chambers who became his close friend and intellectual companion. At her encouragement, he began writing poetry and also started drafting his first novel, which would eventually become The White Peacock. In the fall of 1906 Lawrence, left Eastwood to attend the University College of Nottingham to obtain his teacher's certificate. While there, he won a short story competition for "An Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude," which was published in the Nottingham Guardian in 1907. In order to enter