49 Fun Facts About D. H. Lawrence

What did the initials D. H. stand for in D. H. Lawrence's name?

David Herbert. He disliked David all his life and as a schoolboy would not own up to it, even when the master raged that it was the name of a great and good man; at home he was Bert.

Lawrence was born in 1885 in the town of Eastwood, in which English county?

Nottinghamshire. He left home at 23 and lived his last ten years abroad, yet he went on setting his fiction in the fields and woods around Eastwood, which he called 'the country of my heart'.

What was the occupation of Lawrence's father, Arthur?

Coal miner. Arthur's drinking and the rows it caused set his son against him: the boy in Sons and Lovers, drawn from Lawrence's own childhood, prays, 'Lord, let my father die.'

Lawrence's celebrated 1911 short story about a wife waiting for her husband to come home is called 'Odour of' what?

Chrysanthemums. Lawrence liked the plot enough to tell it twice: the wife who waits all evening, and learns why her husband is late, returns in his play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Lawrence worked in which profession, including a spell in Croydon?

Teacher. He taught boys in Croydon for three years, until pneumonia nearly killed him late in 1911; warned not to go back to the classroom, he decided to live by his writing instead.

Which Haggs Farm friend sent Lawrence's early poems to Ford Madox Ford and inspired 'Miriam'?

Jessie Chambers. It cost her dearly: she read the drafts of Sons and Lovers and helped him finish it, but her portrait as Miriam hurt her so much that the friendship ended with the book.

Lawrence's first novel came out two years before Sons and Lovers; what was it called?

The White Peacock. His dying mother hardly responded to the first copy, and his father, told it had earned fifty pounds, said: 'An' tha's niver done a day's hard work in thy life.'

Looking back on his restless years of travel, Lawrence called them 'a savage enough' what?

Pilgrimage. His friend Catherine Carswell borrowed the phrase for her 1932 life of him, which had to be withdrawn when John Middleton Murry threatened to sue over how it portrayed him.

Ernest Weekley, whose German wife Frieda ran off with Lawrence, had taught him which subject at college?

Modern languages. Weekley had taught him French, and in 1912 Lawrence came to lunch to ask the professor's advice about work in Germany; two months later he left for Germany with the professor's wife.

Frieda Lawrence was born into which German noble family?

Von Richthofen. Frieda was a baron's daughter and a distant cousin of Manfred, the flying ace known as the Red Baron; she gave up a professor's comfortable home to live on a penniless writer's earnings.

Soon after eloping to Germany in 1912, Lawrence had to leave Metz when police took him for what?

A British spy. He and Frieda had strayed into a military area of the garrison town, and it took her father's influence to get him off; Lawrence left for Trier at once, cursing 'the damn fools'.

Sons and Lovers (1913) centres on which young man torn between his mother and two lovers?

Paul Morel. His name was the book's working title almost to the end; Lawrence's first publisher turned the draft down flat, shocked at how low it brought the hero's mother, and another firm took it.

The Rainbow (1915) follows three generations of which Midlands farming family?

The Brangwens. The saga opens with farmer Tom Brangwen marrying a Polish widow and ends two generations on with Ursula, alone after rejecting her soldier lover, seeing a rainbow as the promise of a new world.

What became of The Rainbow after magistrates heard the obscenity case against it in 1915?

The seized copies were destroyed. Methuen, the publisher, offered no defence and told the court it regretted bringing the book out, so all 1,011 copies went without a word said for them.

Lawrence originally conceived The Rainbow and Women in Love as a single work under which title?

The Sisters. Retitled The Wedding Ring, the draft grew too long and split in two: he carved The Rainbow out of it for 1915 and later worked the material left over into Women in Love.

In Women in Love, Gudrun is paired with which industrialist?

Gerald Crich. The affair ends in violence at an Alpine ski resort: after attacking Gudrun he walks off alone into the snow and freezes to death.

Who won the Best Actress Oscar for Ken Russell's 1969 film of Women in Love?

Glenda Jackson. She played the artist Gudrun, won a second Oscar three years later for A Touch of Class, then gave up acting in 1992 to spend 23 years as a Labour MP.

Which two actors wrestle naked by firelight in the 1969 film Women in Love?

Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. The scene was not in the script: director Ken Russell recalled that Reed talked him into it by pinning him down in his own kitchen until he agreed.

Accused of signalling to German submarines, the Lawrences were expelled from which county in 1917?

Cornwall. Neighbours near Zennor decided the patterns on the couple's chimney were signals; their cottage was searched, and the next day a military order gave them three days to get out of the county.

In Lawrence's novel Kangaroo, the title is the nickname of a lawyer who leads a secret army of ex-soldiers in which city?

Sydney. Lawrence knew Australia for only about three months, yet he wrote almost the whole novel in six weeks at Thirroul, a seaside town forty miles down the coast.

Sailing east in 1922, the Lawrences reached Australia after six weeks on which island, where he found himself unable to write?

Ceylon. He went to stay with American friends at Kandy, but the heat and the noise of the forest defeated him: 'I don't believe I shall ever work here', he wrote, and sailed on.

Which socialite invited the Lawrences to Taos in 1922 and later gave Frieda a ranch in the mountains nearby?

Mabel Dodge Luhan. Guest and hostess clashed almost at once: within weeks Lawrence complained that she 'arranges one too much', and he moved out of town into the hills to be free of her.

What did Frieda give in return for the Taos ranch a wealthy patron offered the couple in 1924?

It was the manuscript of Sons and Lovers; Frieda later left the ranch to the University of New Mexico.

Which Lawrence novel of 1926 imagines Mexico swept by a revival of its old Aztec gods?

The Plumed Serpent. He called it 'my real novel of America', but it was his last word on strongman rulers: two years later he told a friend that 'the leader of men is a back number'.

Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature calls which work 'the greatest book of the sea ever written'?

Moby-Dick. The praise came as Melville, half-forgotten for decades, was being rediscovered, and Lawrence's 1923 book is counted among those that helped bring him back.

Which Lawrence novel about a draper's daughter and an Italian performer won the 1920 James Tait Black prize?

The Lost Girl. Its heroine ends up in a bare farmhouse high in the Italian mountains, and Lawrence knew the road: he and Frieda had just made the same winter journey themselves.

Sea and Sardinia records a 1921 trip Lawrence made from his home on which island?

Sicily. It was only a flying visit, made half in hope of finding a new home, yet within weeks he had a whole book out of it, in which Frieda appears throughout as 'the queen bee'.

Lawrence's poem 'Snake' appears in which 1923 collection?

Birds, Beasts and Flowers. In the poem a snake comes to drink at the speaker's water trough; he throws a log at it as it leaves, and is left with 'something to expiate: a pettiness'.

In a famous late poem, Lawrence turns which dark-blue flower into a torch to light his way to the underworld?

Gentians. In 'Bavarian Gentians' the September flowers burn dark instead of bright, so he asks for one as a torch to lead him down to Pluto's halls, where Persephone goes back each autumn.

In a 1926 Lawrence short story, how does a young boy find out which racehorses will win?

Riding his rocking horse. In 'The Rocking-Horse Winner' he rides himself into a trance to quiet a house that whispers 'There must be more money', and dies soon after his last winner, Malabar, comes in.

Lawrence's short work The Escaped Cock, also published as The Man Who Died, retells what?

The Resurrection of Jesus. In Lawrence's own summary the risen man 'feels very sick about everything' and 'can't stand the old crowd any more', so he walks away, glad to have no 'mission' left.

Lawrence's school textbook Movements in European History first appeared in 1921 under what?

A pseudonym. Oxford University Press issued it as the work of 'Lawrence H. Davison'; it was the one book Lawrence wrote almost purely for money, at a time when he was close to destitute.

Lady Chatterley's Lover was first printed, privately, in 1928 in which Italian city?

Florence. The little print shop had only enough type to set half the book at a time, and its printer read no English; told what the novel was about, he smiled and said, 'But we do it every day!'

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, why is Sir Clifford Chatterley confined to a wheelchair?

A First World War injury. Lawrence said he had not planned the wound as a symbol, but came to see Clifford's paralysis as standing for the 'emotional or passional paralysis' of men of his class.

What is the occupation of Oliver Mellors, Lady Chatterley's lover?

Gamekeeper. Mellors is no simple countryman: the army made him a lieutenant in India and he can talk 'like any gentleman', yet back at Wragby he chooses to speak broad Derbyshire dialect.

Which alternative title did Lawrence seriously consider for Lady Chatterley's Lover?

John Thomas and Lady Jane. Both are old slang names for the private parts; a shocked friend proposed the title 'rather savagely', and Lawrence took it up: 'Many a true word spoken in spite.'

Which publisher was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1960 over the full text of Lady Chatterley's Lover?

Penguin Books. The attempt to ban the novel made it a bestseller: in the three months after the acquittal the firm sold three million copies.

At the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, the prosecutor asked the jury if it was a book they would wish whom to read?

Your wife or your servants. The question caused amusement in court, where the defence had made sure three women sat on the jury, and it is remembered as the moment the prosecution showed how out of touch it was.

The 1961 paperback of Lady Chatterley's Lover was dedicated to whom?

The twelve jurors. It thanked the 'three women and nine men' whose not-guilty verdict, reached in three hours, had made the novel 'available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom'.

Which poet wrote that sexual intercourse began in 1963, after the Chatterley ban ended?

Philip Larkin. His poem 'Annus Mirabilis' treats the 1960 acquittal as the start of the permissive Sixties, and adds ruefully that it all came 'rather late for me'.

What happened when Lawrence's paintings were exhibited at the Warren Gallery in London in 1929?

Police raided it and seized works. Thirteen paintings were taken as obscene, and they escaped destruction only on a promise that they would never be shown in England again.

Lawrence died on 2 March 1930 in Vence, in the south of France, of complications from which disease?

Tuberculosis. He hated to admit how ill he was and would not die in a sanatorium: the day before his death he discharged himself from the one at Vence and moved to a rented villa.

What emblem did Lawrence adopt, later set in mosaic on his headstone by Frieda?

The phoenix. He first chose it in 1915 as the badge of Rananim, the colony of friends he hoped to found far from the war; the colony never came, but the bird stayed with him to the grave.

To foil a rival's plan to scatter them, what was done with Lawrence's ashes at the ranch near Taos?

Mixed into concrete. The ashes were set in the memorial block of his chapel, safe from the friend who wanted them scattered; Angelo Ravagli later claimed he had left the real ones behind in France.

Which friend edited the first collection of Lawrence's letters, published posthumously?

Aldous Huxley. He and his wife Maria came to Vence for Lawrence's last days, and Maria was at the bedside when he died; Huxley's edition of the letters followed two years later, in 1932.

Which philosopher, once a friend, later wrote that Lawrence's ideas 'led straight to Auschwitz'?

Bertrand Russell. In 1915 he thought Lawrence 'infallible' and planned a joint course of lectures with him in London; they quarrelled before it began, and he came to see in Lawrence the makings of fascism.

Which feminist critic's 1970 book Sexual Politics attacked Lawrence and Norman Mailer as prophets of male supremacy?

Kate Millett. The book, her Columbia doctoral thesis, made her famous overnight: Time put her on its cover that August, and Norman Mailer answered with a whole book of his own, The Prisoner of Sex.

Who was Oscar-nominated for playing the hard-drinking father in the 1960 film of Sons and Lovers?

Trevor Howard. His English son was played by a young American, Dean Stockwell, the choice of the film's Hollywood producer; of its seven Oscar nominations it won only for Freddie Francis's camerawork.

Who played Constance in the 2022 Netflix film of Lady Chatterley's Lover?

Emma Corrin. The film nods to an earlier version: Joely Richardson, who played Connie in the BBC's 1993 serial, comes back here as Mrs Bolton, the nurse who watches the affair unfold.