Birds, Beasts and Flowers

D.H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottingham in 1895, to a father who was a miner and a mother who was a home-based lace-worker. After beginnings as a teacher, Lawrence's work was taken up by Ford Madox Ford and others, and he made a significant mark as a novelist and as a writer of short stories. Often steeped in controversy because of his frank treatment of sexuality, but also because of his elopement with another man's wife-a German national-just before World War 1, Lawrence eventually was to spend many years in voluntary exile in continental Europe, and then in Mexico and the U.S.A. Famous in the wider world for novels such as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and the scandal-struck Lady Chatterley's Lover, he wrote over 800 poems, and several collections of short stories and volumes of essays. He was also an accomplished painter. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence, in the south of France, in 1930.