Over the rainbow: D.H. Lawrence’s search for a new way of life

When it comes to biography, some authors draw the punters, and others leave the mob cold. D.H. Lawrence has been written about a lot, from the moment he died. At least ten memoirs were published in the five years after his death by authors ranging from his sister and his wife to patrons such as Mabel Dodge Luhan. More followed, and only professional Lawrence scholars will have read all of them. There must be dozens of them, and some, such as the Cambridge three-volume effort by different authors, are immensely long. By comparison, there are only a handful of full-scale lives of James Joyce, and poor old Arnold Bennett has only one (excellent) biography, by Margaret Drabble. What is it about Lawrence that draws them so?

It might be something frustratingly incomplete about the literary output. Every aspect of his writing produces something masterly — ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’ among the poems, The Rainbow from the novels and the magnificent ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’ from the essays.