D H Lawrence

Maddox presents a richly detailed and startlingly new portrait of D. H. Lawrence: not the bearded prophet with the baleful eye, not the sickly and self-absorbed sexual outlaw, but a vulnerable, sensitive Lawrence, a hilarious mimic, a lover of nature, an inspired teacher, a brilliant journalist, an ecological visionary, and above all - as he saw himself - a married man. The prize-winning author of Nora (Mrs. James Joyce) examines Lawrence's perplexing, restless life through the greatest contradiction in it - his marriage to Frieda, a woman even more defiant of conventional morality than he was. Theirs was a mismatch made in heaven, a marriage with infidelities on both sides, verbal taunts and physical abuse, separations, and the strains of Lawrence's long struggle with tuberculosis. Yet her determined influence on his life and work cannot be overestimated, and they remained together until his bitter, tragic death.