D. H. Lawrence Trivia
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49 free D. H. Lawrence trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
D. H. Lawrence was banned, burned, raided, deported and put on trial thirty years after his death, and this quiz follows the whole scandalous, restless life. It opens in Eastwood with a barely literate miner father and a schoolteacher mother, the scholarship to Nottingham High School, the Croydon classroom, Jessie Chambers and Ford Madox Ford, and the March afternoon in 1912 when he met his professor's German wife and ran off with her within weeks. The novels get their due: Paul Morel and the working title of Sons and Lovers, the Brangwens and the 1,011 copies of The Rainbow burnt at Bow Street, the sisters of Women in Love and the naked wrestling of Ken Russell's film, Kangaroo written in six weeks in Australia, The Plumed Serpent, the ranch Frieda swapped for a manuscript, and Lady Chatterley's Lover from Pino Orioli's Florence print shop to the Old Bailey, the wife-or-servants question and 200,000 copies sold in a day. Then the poems, the seized paintings, tuberculosis in Vence, the phoenix headstone and the ashes that may or may not be in a block of concrete in New Mexico. Easy questions suit anyone who has read one novel; the expert tier reaches Mollie Skinner, The Lost Girl's prize and the pseudonymous school textbook. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Lawrence, his books and the 1960 trial, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did the initials D. H. stand for in D. H. Lawrence's name?
David Herbert
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.
Q 02Lawrence was born in 1885 in the town of Eastwood, in which English county?
Nottinghamshire
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'.
Q 03What was the occupation of Lawrence's father, Arthur?
Coal miner
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.'
Q 04Lawrence's celebrated 1911 short story about a wife waiting for her husband to come home is called 'Odour of' what?
Chrysanthemums
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.
Q 05Before becoming a full-time writer, Lawrence worked in which profession, including a spell in Croydon?
Teacher
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.
Q 06Which Haggs Farm friend sent Lawrence's early poems to Ford Madox Ford and inspired 'Miriam'?
Jessie Chambers
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.
Q 07Lawrence's first novel came out two years before Sons and Lovers; what was it called?
The White Peacock
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.'
Q 08Looking back on his restless years of travel, Lawrence called them 'a savage enough' what?
Pilgrimage
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.
Q 09Ernest Weekley, whose German wife Frieda ran off with Lawrence, had taught him which subject at college?
Modern languages
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.
Q 10Frieda Lawrence was born into which German noble family?
Von Richthofen
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.
Q 11Soon after eloping to Germany in 1912, Lawrence had to leave Metz when police took him for what?
A British spy
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'.
Q 12Sons and Lovers (1913) centres on which young man torn between his mother and two lovers?
Paul Morel
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.
Q 13The Rainbow (1915) follows three generations of which Midlands farming family?
The Brangwens
Q 21Sailing east in 1922, the Lawrences reached Australia after six weeks on which island, where he found himself unable to write?
Ceylon
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.
Q 22Which socialite invited the Lawrences to Taos in 1922 and later gave Frieda a ranch in the mountains nearby?
Mabel Dodge Luhan
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.
Q 23What did Frieda give in return for the Taos ranch a wealthy patron offered the couple in 1924?
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.
Q 14What became of The Rainbow after magistrates heard the obscenity case against it in 1915?
The seized copies were destroyed
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.
Q 15Lawrence originally conceived The Rainbow and Women in Love as a single work under which title?
The Sisters
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.
Q 16In Women in Love, Gudrun is paired with which industrialist?
Gerald Crich
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.
Q 17Who won the Best Actress Oscar for Ken Russell's 1969 film of Women in Love?
Glenda Jackson
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.
Q 18Which two actors wrestle naked by firelight in the 1969 film Women in Love?
Oliver Reed and Alan Bates
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.
Q 19Accused of signalling to German submarines, the Lawrences were expelled from which county in 1917?
Cornwall
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.
Q 20In Lawrence's novel Kangaroo, the title is the nickname of a lawyer who leads a secret army of ex-soldiers in which city?
Sydney
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.
A novel manuscript
It was the manuscript of Sons and Lovers; Frieda later left the ranch to the University of New Mexico.
Q 24Which Lawrence novel of 1926 imagines Mexico swept by a revival of its old Aztec gods?
The Plumed Serpent
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'.
Q 25Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature calls which work 'the greatest book of the sea ever written'?
Moby-Dick
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.
Q 26Which Lawrence novel about a draper's daughter and an Italian performer won the 1920 James Tait Black prize?
The Lost Girl
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.
Q 27Sea and Sardinia records a 1921 trip Lawrence made from his home on which island?
Sicily
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'.
Q 28Lawrence's poem 'Snake' appears in which 1923 collection?
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
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'.
Q 29In a famous late poem, Lawrence turns which dark-blue flower into a torch to light his way to the underworld?
Gentians
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.
Q 30In a 1926 Lawrence short story, how does a young boy find out which racehorses will win?
Riding his rocking horse
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.