D H Lawrence – Sex, Exile and Greatness – DVD

Novelist (infamous for Lady Chatterley’s Lover), poet, social critic, and above all in his own words “an outsider”, D H Lawrence was described by E M Forster as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Partly because of his early death, partly because of the harassment he suffered, and partly because of the poverty he endured, there is a deep sense of sadness underlying his life - despite the brilliance, the enormous talent and the unwavering dedication to his wife.

D H Lawrence’s work has produced divergent and demanding reactions. There are issues in his work of gender, class and race. Much of his style and explicit content flouts aesthetic and literary norms. There is an intensity and darkness in much of Lawrence’s work that challenges and provokes.

Lawrence’s early teenage experiences in Eastwood with Jessie Chambers provided much of the subject matter of his key novels – Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not published in England until 1960, when it was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. The verdict of “not guilty” transformed public description and discussion of sexuality and led to enormous increased freedoms that previously would have been subject to criminal prosecution.

Lawrence described his deepest belief in his essay Democracy as: “each man shall be spontaneously himself – each man himself, each woman herself, without any question of equality entering in at all; and that no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or of any other woman.”

Deeply sensitive yet at times aggressive, intensely preoccupied with sexuality and the truths of human nature, accused of misogyny and worse, Lawrence remains a writer of incredible ability, consistently challenging literary norms and hauntingly brave in his personal, intellectual and creative life.