Sep 12, 2025 Book of the week – Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Happy Birthday D.H. Lawrence!

“For him the novel was not the exposition of a thesis about people, but an adventure of the soul.”
– Richard Aldington on D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence: a complete list of his works…
Richard Aldington
London: William Heinemann, 1935
PR6023 A93 Z552 1935

David Herbert Lawrence: a name some may recognize, though many won’t. For the former group, Lawrence’s name is perhaps less remembered for being “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation,” (as described by twentieth century novelist, E.M. Forster, at the time of Lawrence’s death in March of 1930) and more widely recognized for the space his name has taken up on various banned book lists over the years.

Born September 11, 1885, in a coal mining town of England, Lawrence had an affinity for literature along with the academic world from a young age. He pursued a career in teaching before deciding to write full-time in the Winter of 1912. Today, Lawrence is widely acknowledged by institutions and literary critics as a key figure in the modernist movement. His prose stands alongside those of literary giants such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and others of the era.

Though, the works of Lawrence remain unique in their unabashed examination of modern world themes, ranging in scope from the irreversible effects of a consumerist society to the exploration of queer relationships. Perhaps Boston University’s Julia Prewitt Brown puts it best when she writes,

“No one can replace D.H. Lawrence because no other novelist of his generation showed more courage in exploring the threat that the post-industrial environment poses to what is most alive in human beings and in the natural world.”

Regardless of his literary merits, Lawrence’s content was, and remains, quite controversial. Beginning with the banning of two of his early novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) in the United Kingdom, both of which explored sexual themes in an explicit manner. But, perhaps, the author’s most contested work was also his most famous. Published near the end of his life, Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been a fierce weapon in the book ban war since it was published in 1929. To learn more about this century-long battle, read our previous post on the book which can be found here.

Lawrence’s provocative prose was matched by a scandalous personal life. After an illicit love affair with Freida Weekley, the wife of Lawrence’s modern languages professor, the two eloped and began a life of rootless adventure throughout Europe. At the beginning of WWI the couple returned to Britain where they were accused of spying for the Germans, ultimately leading to Lawrence’s exile from his homeland in 1917. This event coupled with his documented leanings towards fascist, racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic ideologies, should urge the modern reader to approach Lawrence’s writings with a critical eye.

Despite his controversies, it is undeniable that Lawrence’s prose, poetry, and plays have emotionally, viscerally, and tangibly moved artists for generations. One such soul was named Brewster Ghiselin. A former professor of English at the University of Utah, Ghiselin had been so taken with Lawrence that he visited him and Freida in France before embarking upon a year of study at Oxford University in 1928. Ghiselin would go on to spend many days with Lawrence, who was nearing the end of his life. The experience was impactful and inspired Ghiselin’s writing in more than one way. Namely, Ghiselin admired Lawrence’s relationship to the natural world, which he echoed throughout his own career. In The Water of Light, a book honoring Ghiselin published by the University of Utah Press in 1976, prominent author Wallace Stegner writes of Ghiselin’s ability to encapsulate the intricacies of nature through language:

“That has been his double mark–the capacity to take in through the senses the whole range of the natural world, and the curiosity and patience and passion to know it in its quintessence, its ultimate quiddity, its absolute right image or word.”

Beyond the intrinsic value of his writings, Ghiselin contributed greatly to the overarching literary landscape in Utah, namely through his establishment and leadership of the Utah Writer’s Conference which is still active today. Additionally, his book, The Creative Process: A Symposium, includes essays on the title’s topic from some of the twentieth centuries greatest thinkers, including Albert Einstein,  Carl Jung, and, unsurprisingly, D.H. Lawrence.

Among the materials Ghiselin donated to the University of Utah is a rare volume titled Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of the last works Lawrence published before his death in 1930. Printed by the short-lived, London-based Mandrake Press (1929–1930), the slim volume reads more like an extended essay than a narrative. The volume is enveloped in a blue cloth which is hidden by a delicate orange sleeve with a doodle of Lawrence taking up the page’s negative space.

Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s love
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
London: Mandrake Press ltd, 1930
PR6023 A93 P76 1930

The volume includes a striking woodcut of a phoenix rising from flames on its title page. The phoenix, Lawrence’s self-proclaimed symbol, is closely associated with his legacy. For some, it represents his belief in nature’s power to rise from the metaphorical ashes of industrialization. Though, here, it could represent Lawrence’s work enduring the flames of book bans and cultural criticism in order to find its place within the modern literary canon.

Lawrence’s attempt to speak out against the public’s inclination to ban his books because of their sexual nature is the central topic of the volume which is accompanied by his own justifications for the themes of his art. Time and again, Lawrence urges his reader to celebrate the important relationship between the body and the mind and art’s vital role in fostering that connection. The University of Utah’s copy is annotated with pencil, presumably by Ghiselin himself.

At a time when romantic, perhaps even erotic, literature is monopolizing the bestseller lists, its worth looking back at literature’s more transgressive figures, like D.H. Lawrence, who paved the way for the books of our current cultural obsessions to be not only accepted, but ultimately enjoyed.

So, this week, we say:

Happy birthday D.H. Lawrence.

Contributed by Theadora Soter, Rare Books Assistant Curator
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For more information about the controversial life of DH Lawrence or the relationship between the renowned author and our very own Brewster Ghiselin, we have included some additional materials found in the Rare Books Collection below:

D.H. Lawrence, an appreciation
The manuscripts of D. H. Lawrence : a descriptive catalogueD.H. Lawrence and his critics : a chronological excursion in bio-bibliography
Let there be light