BRIAN FINNEY is an Associate Professor in English at California State University, Long Beach, USA. He taught at London University from 1964-1987, and, since emigrating to the USA, at UCR, UCLA, and USC. He has published" Since How It Is: A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction" (1972)," Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography" for which he awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979," The Inner I: British Literary Autobiography of the Twentieth Century" (1985) and" D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers: A Critical Study" (1990).
D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885. His father was a coal miner and Lawrence grew up in a mining town in England. He always hated the mines, however, and frequently used them in his writing to represent both darkness and industrialism, which he despised because he felt it was scarring the English countryside. Lawrence attended high school and college in Nottingham and, after graduation, became a school teacher in Croyden in 1908. Although his first two novels had been unsuccessful, he turned to writing full time when a serious illness forced him to stop teaching. Lawrence spent much of his adult life abroad in Europe, particularly Italy, where he wrote some of his… most significant and most controversial novels, including Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda , who had left her first husband and her children to live with him, spent several years touring Europe and also lived in New Mexico for a time. Lawrence had been a frail child, and he suffered much of his life from tuberculosis. Eventually, he retired to a sanitorium in Nice, France. He died in France in 1930, at age 44. In his relatively short life, he produced more than 50 volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel journals, and letters, in addition to the novels for which he is best known.
Christa Jansohn is Professor of English and Head of the Centre of British Studies, University of Bamberg, Germany.
Dieter Mehl is Professor Emeritus, University of Bonn, Germany.