Lady Chatterley's Lover, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers (3 volumes, Easton Press Collector's Editions)

LAWRENCE, D. H. Sons and Lovers; Women in Love; Lady Chatterley's Lover. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1988; 1988; 2005. 3 vols.

Large Octavo. All three volumes bound in full deep red leather. Spines with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page markers. Sons and Lovers illustrated by Richard Miller. [Pagination to be confirmed per volume.] Three Collector's Editions, uniformly bound. All fine, presenting as new.

David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth child of a coal miner and a former schoolteacher whose marriage was defined by class tension, mutual disappointment, and an intensity of feeling that Lawrence spent his career processing in fiction. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having written eleven novels, many of them banned or prosecuted, and having lived in England, Italy, Germany, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. The three novels gathered here represent the full range of his achievement and the full arc of his development as a novelist.

Sons and Lovers (1913) is the earliest and in some ways the most directly autobiographical. Paul Morel, the son of a Nottinghamshire miner and an aspirational, deeply possessive mother, struggles to find himself and to love freely while bound by a maternal attachment that distorts every other relationship in his life. Lawrence wrote the novel while his own mother was dying, and the book carries that proximity: the rendering of Gertrude Morel is among the most psychologically complex portraits of a parent in twentieth-century fiction. The Modern Library placed it ninth on their list of the hundred best novels of the century.

Women in Love (1920) is the greater and stranger novel. The sequel to The Rainbow, it follows two sisters — Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen — and the men they become entangled with: Rupert Birkin, a school inspector with Lawrentian views about the nature of authentic human connection, and Gerald Crich, a mine owner whose relationship to power and control is ultimately fatal. Set against the backdrop of industrial England and the First World War, which Lawrence regarded as the end of a civilisation, the novel asks what it might mean to live and love honestly in a world organised around mechanism and death. It is formally radical, psychologically demanding, and thematically inexhaustible.

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was the last of the three to be written and the most notorious. Connie Chatterley, married to a war-wounded baronet who is paralysed from the waist down, begins an affair with the gamekeeper Mellors. The novel was privately published in Florence in 1928 and not legally available in its unexpurgated form in England or America until 1960, when it was the subject of the most celebrated obscenity trial in British legal history. The prosecution failed, and Lawrence's novel was vindicated — though what the prosecution missed, and what many subsequent readers have also missed, is that the explicit sexuality is not the point: the novel is a meditation on class, embodiment, and whether tenderness between human beings is still possible in a world that has learned to treat everything as a resource.

All three volumes fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000474